Wildwood Boys (47 page)

 

As Butch made to mount up, Bill said, “Hey boy, you’ll
really
be
sorry if you pass up a hug from Bush and a cup or two of her cinnamon cider. If I was you, I’d get in here and get my share of both.”

 

Butch lowered his foot from the stirrup and stared at Bill a
moment—then grinned and said, “Hell, I thought you’d never ask.”

They spent the rest of that day together, the four of them, sipping
cider and smoking, talking and telling jokes. After a time, they
started lacing the cider with Bill’s jug and after a while longer dispensed with the cider altogether. Bush began preparing a big kettle of
rabbit stew and two large pans of cornbread. The little room was
soon thick with savory aromas and Jim and Butch did not have to be
argued into staying to supper.

They told Bill and Bush about Christmas Day, when a bunch of
guerrillas went into town and got fairly well drunk in their celebration of the Good Lord’s birthday. They galloped up and down the
streets, howling and shooting the bells in church steeples, shooting
rooftop weathercocks into a spin, shooting the knobs off doors. Ben
Christian, the owner of the only hotel in town and a friend of
Quantrill, hastily sent a rider out to Mineral Springs to fetch
Quantrill while he went out to remonstrate with the guerrillas.

The bushwhackers laughed at the innkeeper and said they’d
show him what a real disturbance was—then rode their horses into
his hotel and scared the living God out of everyone within. The animals knocked over and broke up furniture, tore the carpeting with
their hooves, chewed up the potted plants. Women shrieked as the
guerrillas shot apart the lamplights and a chandelier, showering the
lobby with glass.

The bushwhackers then repaired to a photography studio to
have their pictures made. They posed in groups and individually,
brandishing pistols and bottles and cigars and fearsome aspects. But
then the photographist ran out of plates, and in their anger the bushwhackers who’d not yet had their pictures taken made ruin of the
man’s studio and equipment.

Then Quantrill arrived, accompanied by George Todd and three
dozen men—including Jim Anderson and Butch Berry—and the celebrants were rounded up and driven back to camp, laughing and
regaling their sober comrades with the details of their spree, George
Todd laughing as hard as any of them, most of them entirely
unmindful of Quantrill’s disapproving glare. The next day, however,
when they’d sobered somewhat, Quantrill took them back to town
and ordered them to apologize to Ben Christian and the photographist and to pay for the damages to their establishments.

Even some of the men who hadn’t been on the spree thought
Quantrill was going too far to make the roisterers pay for the damage. “We been fighting the Yanks so these people can sit home all
safe and get rich,” Fletch Taylor had said. “And we’re making them
even richer with all the money we spend in their damn town. But let
us do a little whooping and they’re quick to complain on us and put
their hand out for more money. That don’t speak of a proper gratitude, you ask me.”

Jim said it surely did look like Quantrill was more concerned
with Ben Christian’s property than with his own men’s right to have
a little fun. One of the new boys asked George Todd if

he
would’ve
made the fellas pay and apologize, and Todd just spat and shook his
head. The new man turned to a friend and said, “See? I told ye.”

Bill said if Quantrill wasn’t careful, he might lose his whole company to Todd one of these days. Jim said Quantrill seemed to be
thinking the same thing, and that was probably why W. J. Gregg
wasn’t with the company anymore—which was news to Bill. About a
week ago, Jim said, W. J. and Todd had got into a bad argument over
some money Gregg said Todd owed him. Todd got so hot about it he
told Gregg he’d kill him if he didn’t get out of camp before morning
and never come back. Gregg’s friends saw the quarrel as a personal
matter between him and Todd and were keeping out of it, but Todd
had a lot of new wildboys in his bunch ready to do anything he said,
and Gregg was sure he would put some of them up to killing him. He
went to Quantrill and asked him to intervene, but Quantrill said he
couldn’t. He said it wouldn’t do any good to cause splits in the company over a personal difference between two men. His advice was
for Gregg to leave the camp. Gregg was saddling up to go when he
told all this to Jim. He said he’d never been as disappointed by any
man as he was by Quantrill. A dozen friends were leaving with him.
He said for Jim to tell Bill so long, and then he was gone, off to join
Jo Shelby’s regulars.

“W. J.’s a damn good man,” Bill said. “I hate to see him gone.
He’s been with the company as long as anybody, and it’s a bad sign
for Quantrill not to back him.” He had not seen Quantrill since his
wedding day. Nor dismissed the insult of his presumptuous counsel
against his marriage. Or forgiven his absence from his wedding celebration. Or forgotten the implication of his remark to Todd that
Kate had never been a whore.

“Ah hell, enough of this,” Bill said. “Who cares a damn about
Quantrill’s troubles, anyway? Let’s kick our heels.”

 

And so they did. Jim Anderson took out his harmonica, and
Butch Berry produced his Jew’s harp, and they started in on
“Drunken Hiccups.” Bill and Bush whirled around on the small span
of cabin floor. After a while Jim cut in on Bill and handed him the
mouth organ, and then Butch too claimed his turn with Bush as Bill
filled in with twanging the harp. And though this woman could not
but remind Butch Berry of the lost Josephine he’d so hopelessly
loved, he did not feel the desperate flailing of his heart he’d felt in
dancing with Josie, but only the swirling joy of it.

 

So it went into the early darkness. Someone passing in view of
that cabin in its white landscape under the full winter moon would
have seen its chimney smoke rising in a gentle blue column and
smelled the redolence of the supper stew, seen the warm yellow glow
at the window and heard faintly the music and the laughter—and
would surely have envied those within.

Cole Younger was the next to go. He hallooed the house from the
dooryard fence one late morning and turned down Bill’s invitation to
dismount and come inside for coffee. A half-dozen men were with
him, all of them outfitted for a long journey. Cole said he was tired of
the bushwhacker life and anyway didn’t care much for the sort of
recruits coming into the company nowadays. Most were half-crazed
young boys, naturalborn killers and thieves who’d joined the guerrillas for no reason but the occasion to murder and steal more freely.
When he told his men he was leaving, most of them had gone over to
Todd’s bunch, which had become about the worst collection of
hooligans he’d ever seen. He didn’t see much difference anymore
between a gang like Todd’s and any gang of redlegs, and he didn’t
even want to imagine how much worse the meanness would get
come next summer. The war was anyhow lost, and he didn’t feature
getting killed for a cause without a hope in hell left to it.

Bill said Cole was waving the white flag a little too soon, in his
opinion. Cole said he would never in his life wave a white flag but he
wouldn’t wave a black one anymore either. The way he saw it, once
the war was done with, there would be Yankee banks everywhere,
and it would practically be his sworn duty as an unsurrendered rebel
to rob as many of them as he could. Until then, he believed he would
pass the time in California. Bill said he was sorry to see him go. Cole
said he was sorry to see him stay. Then he was gone.

Not two weeks after that, Jim brought word that John Jarrette
had quit the company too. He’d been promised the rank of captain
in the regulars and had gone off with thirty of his men. Of his boys
who stayed behind, most of them joined with Todd.

Still another seasoned bushwhacker lost to the company was
George Maddox. He’d received word that his wife had been taken
seriously ill, and so had returned to Missouri to be with her. But
someone peached him to the Federals and he was arrested as one of
the bushwhackers who’d been recognized at Lawrence. He would
spend the rest of the war behind bars and finally come to trial in
Ottawa, Kansas, the only guerrilla ever tried for the Lawrence raid.
But as rumor would have it in the years to come, unknown associates
of Maddox visited with members of the jury and money changed
hands. For a fact the jury would acquit Maddox of all charges and
howls of outrage would shake the courtroom as he was hustled out a
rear door and onto a horse held by his waiting wife.

The winter deepened. The farmers had been right in their predictions
of heavy snow, and the world seemed to slow under the weight of it.
When he went out to the stable in the mornings to fork hay for the
horses, he would pause in the yard and breathe deep aching lungfuls
of the chilly air. His breath rose in blue billows. The trees stood bare.
Nothing moved in that gelid landscape but a few curious crows looking like oiled shadows on the naked branches, snickering and
whistling.

They went for long walks into the skeletal woodland, holding to
each other, giggling at their slips on patches of ice, at their clumsy
missteps in the snow. They made running slides on the frozen creek
and each hooted at the other when the slide ended in a sprawl. They
engaged in snowball skirmishes. They constructed snowmen so illformed that Bush felt as sorry for them as cripples. He built a sled
and pulled her on it and they’d ride it tandem down the hill, holding
tight to each other and whooping all the way, sometimes capsizing in
a tangled laughing heap before reaching the bottom.

One late afternoon of long shadows under a rosy sky he brought
down a deer at sixty yards with a single pistolshot to the head, a big
buck with a wide rack. Bush helped him to lug it home on the sled.
They dressed it by firelight on a frame behind the house and for
weeks after feasted on venison.

Sometimes he would take out his battered volume of Shakespeare
and read to her from the sonnets. His favorite was the one in which
the poet tells his lover that even when he is in disgrace with fortune
and men’s eyes and almost despising himself, the very thought of her
makes him feel so rich that he wouldn’t trade places with a king.
Hers was the one comparing the lover to a summer’s day.

He bought a bathtub in town, an oversized clawfoot model, and
with the help of Jim and Butch carried it home on a flatwagon they
commandeered from the camp. They had to cut the doorway wider
to get the tub inside, and they set it next to the hearth. They then
added a plank to the door and cut it to fit the expanded doorway and
they felt like expert and clever craftsmen when they were done. Jim
and Butch stood looking at the tub and then looked at Bill, who
grinned and winked. Bush smiled at them and said, “What are all
you wicked boys thinking?” Then all of them broke out laughing,
and Butch said, “Come on, Jimbo, let’s go over to the Moon and pay
the girls our respects. What I’m thinking won’t allow for a damn
thing else till I do that.”

The nights were long now and they were glad of it. The wind keened
under the eaves and fluted at the edges of the windows and door.
Almost every evening, they would boil large kettles of water until the
tub was full and steaming. She’d knot her hair up on her head and let
him relieve her of her clothes. He’d take his time about it, pausing in
the process to kiss portions of her as they came exposed, breasts,
belly, buttocks, the backs of her knees. Then she’d undress him as
slowly and with as much caress. They’d inhale through their teeth
against the bathwater’s heat as they gingerly sank themselves in it.
They’d take turns bathing each other, one of them now standing,
now kneeling, now on all fours, now giggling or sighing, as the other
ministered with soapy hands and cloth. They would joke about
being the cleanest two people in Missouri. She’d recline against his
chest, his arms around her, their knees jutting from the water, and
they’d softly sing songs of their own making as the walls around
them quivered with firelight and shadow. When the tubwater turned
cool they’d step out and dry each other and sit naked on a quilt in
front of the fire. He’d unloose her hair and brush it gently as he’d
been taught by his sisters until it hung straight and loose and shining.
She’d comb his hair free of its knots and sometimes braid it for the
pleasure it gave her. She’d trim his beard and his mustache. They’d
pause now and again to kiss like they were trying to breathe each
other’s soul. Then they’d take to the bed and make love, and afterward lie entwined under the blankets and looking through the frostbordered window at the night sky, some nights seeing the moon or
some portion of it and some nights only its glow and some nights a
blacker sky clustered with stars. The first time they saw a falling star
together, she’d squeezed his hand and whispered, “Momma always
said to make a wish.” But all he thought was,

Joey,
and he’d hugged
Bush more tightly to him and buried his face in her hair.

He rarely dreamt, but when he did, it was often of a crashing building, of falling bricks and rising dust and the mortal screamings of
young women. He would come awake without sound to the dim
glow of the lowered hearthfire, Bush snugged against him, her easy
breath of sleep soft on his neck. He’d lie open-eyed until his heart
slowed and the comforting warmth of Bush’s skin and the scent of it
and of her hair were all he was aware of, and then he’d sleep again.
But one late night when he went into the dream, her hand was on his
chest and even in her sleep she felt his heart’s sudden jumping and
she came awake too. She heard his halting breath and knew he was
crying and knew why. She put her hand to his face and said softly,
“You didn’t kill her, Bill. You didn’t. I think she’d cuss you like a fishwife if she knew you thought so.”