Wildwood Boys (49 page)

 

She smiled and petted his face.

 

“If I’m anything in this world more than a horse thief, I’m their
captain.”

 

“I know.”

 

“If I quit them—” He gestured vaguely.

 

“Then I might not recognize you anymore,” she said. “And
that,
Captain Anderson, would be just terrible.”

 

He touched her smile. She kissed his fingers. “Do you truly
understand?” he said.

 

“Oh, hell no. Do
you
?”

 

“Not in any way I can say that makes sense.”

 

“
That
I understand,” she said.

 

“I still don’t want to leave you.”

 

“I know,” she said. “And you know I’ll be here waiting for you.
Now that’s an end on it. Let’s not say another word on it. Let’s just
go on inside and do that thing we do so well.”

Two weeks later Butch and Jim reported that McCulloch had summoned Quantrill to his headquarters at Bonham and then tried to
arrest him for insubordination. But Quantrill had suspected a trap,
and he managed a neat escape, together with the forty men he’d
taken to Bonham with him. He made straight for the Red but sent a
rider to Mineral Creek to warn Todd and the others and they’d
cleared out quickly too. The regulars gave chase but by the time they
arrived at the river the bushwhackers were all on the other side,
beyond reach of McCulloch’s authority. Quantrill stood up in the
stirrups and patted his ass at the soldiers in an old gesture of contempt—and then they rode off laughing.

“Funny thing is,” Jim said, “McCulloch put out word that the
Anderson guerrillas helped in the chase after Quantrill and Todd.
Why you reckon he did that, Bill?”

Bill shrugged. “Probably wants to put us in better stead with the
locals than Quantrill was. Get them to quit complaining so much to
him. That’s good. If we don’t give the good folk reason to be upset
with us, the general will be happy and not press us to work for him
like he was pressing Quantrill.” He grinned. “Tell the boys watch
their manners in town from now on.”

***

 

Quantrill and Todd had set up a new camp in the Choctaw Nation,
but after two weeks there, Fletch Taylor came back across the river
to join Bill’s company. He said he couldn’t stand the sniping between
Todd and Quantrill anymore.

“I swear, I’ve seen them come

A woeful account
yay
close to pulling guns. The
thing is, they’re scared of each other. Whoever stops being scared
first is the one’ll come out top dog.”

The new grass leaned in the spring wind, the trees swayed, the first
sporadic rains arrived. The company set about smoking and jerking
beef and venison to be in good supply all the way back to Missouri.

On a drizzly afternoon, Jim Anderson showed up at the cabin,
accompanied by a young bushwhacker he introduced as Jack Henry.
The man was wan and gaunt and his right sleeve was folded on the
stump of his arm and pinned to his shoulder. As the men clumped
into the house, crows looked on from the dooryard fence.

Jack Henry was one of Andy Blunt’s boys who’d stayed with him
in Missouri over the winter. He was only seventeen but had long
been shed of boyhood, and his face showed that he carried hard
news. When Bush heard that he’d been with Blunt, she put aside the
pan of cornbread she was preparing and came to sit at the table with
them.

The cripple had been avoiding her eyes. “My brother’s dead, isn’t
he?” she said.

 

Now he fixed his gaze on her. “Yes, mam, I’m sorry to say.”

 

She sighed as if she’d been expecting just this news for some
time, but she didn’t weep nor make any show of grief. She simply
looked worn.

 

“Ike Berry too,” Jack Henry said. “And Val Baker.”

 

“Shit,” Bill said. He glanced at Jim, who said, “Butch knows. He
went off in the woods.”

 

“Tell it,” Bill said to Jack Henry....

Blunt’s camp was in the snowy hills a few miles from Warrensburg
and consisted of a half-dozen scattered and well-hidden dugouts,
each one housing three or four men. In January Ike Berry and Val
Baker showed up. They’d been visiting with Baker’s wife at her parents’ place a few miles downriver and were rested and well-fed. After
all the backslapping how-do’s were done with and a jug was started
around, Ike told of his errand to fetch Ned Smith. Blunt said the boy
had proved himself as brave and tough as any man in the company
and he’d hate to lose him, but if he wanted to go he could go.

Ned was glad to hear his sister was safely in Texas, but he didn’t
want to leave the company—not until Ike told him that Bush was
married to none other than Bill Anderson. The boy was jubilant to
learn he was brother-in-law to Bloody Bill, and now was eager to get
to Texas and be introduced. Jack Henry asked if he could ride back
to Texas with them and they said sure. His parents had been run off
their farm by Order 11 and gone to Nacogdoches to live with his
uncle, and he wanted to go make sure they were all right.

They set out on a day so cold their spit froze before it hit the
ground. It wasn’t till Ike Berry led them east off the Blackwater trace
and onto the Holden road that Jack and Ned learned of the picture
he carried of the blonde girl, and of his hope of finding out who she
was from the Harrisonville photographist who’d made the likeness.
They all but Ike thought it was a fool’s errand. Even if he should
learn her name and where she lived, she wasn’t likely to be swept off
her feet by one of the bushwhackers who killed her beau and scalped
him. Maybe not, Ike said, but he had to try.

In Harrisonville they discovered that the studio and several
adjoining buildings had been burned down by redlegs more than a
year ago. Nobody knew what had become of the old picturetaker
who’d owned the place. Ike’s disconsolation lingered for days as they
made their way south through the ruins of the borderland counties,
the region now long deserted and seeming lifeless in the pale dead of
winter, its eerie silence broken only by the callings of crows. Valentine Baker had wanted to go around this badland and avoid the risk
of running into any Yankee patrols, but Ike argued that there was no
need to add all those miles to their journey. He said the Federals
weren’t likely to do much patrolling in this wasteland anymore, especially not in the winter. And so they pressed due south and made it
through the region of Order 11 without incident, and Ike said he told
them so. They had just crossed the Marmaton in Vernon County one
early afternoon when a militia patrol of some thirty men came riding
over a hill and spied them.

They tried to run for it, but as they raced around a bend in the
trail, Jack Henry’s horse was shot from under him and flung him
tumbling down a steep snowy slope. Two of the militiamen rode up
to the edge of the rise as he was struggling to get to his feet and one
of them shot him in the arm and other in the chest. He would have
no memory of being shot yet again, this time in the back, as he lay
facedown in the snow.

He woke up in a raging fever, the taste of his own blood in his
mouth, swathed in bandages and his own high stink. He was in a
narrow bunk in a dimly lighted back room of a house, being watched
over by an old man and his crone of a wife. Their name was Pinker,
and their farm stood less than a mile from the trail where he’d been
shot. They’d heard the gunfire and trudged out through the snow to
see what they might find, and what they’d found was him, sopping
bright red against the white snow and near to dead. “It was the cold
what saved ye,” the old man told him. “Slowed the blood from all
running out.” This couple, whose four sons had all been killed on
different occasions by Unionists of one sort or another, had fashioned a rough travois of tree limbs and branches and on it dragged
him back to their place. They tended to his wounds and waited to see
if he would ever wake again. Six days later he did.

They’d dug the balls out of his back and chest and treated the
wounds with oil of turpentine, and they said he was in little danger
of dying from either of those wounds. But the bullet that hit his
arm had fragmented even as it shattered the elbow, and now the arm
was poisoned beyond salvation. Pinker said it would have to come
off. “We can do her,” his old woman said, “we’ve had lots of practice.” Then he passed out again. The next time he woke the arm was
gone.

They gave him the additional hard news that his three comrades
had been killed within two miles of where he himself had been shot.
The way the Pinkers had heard the story told in town, the guerrillas
tried to make a stand in an abandoned barn, but the militia set it afire
and drove out two of them—the one left inside was already dead.
The pair to come out were shot up so bad they couldn’t ride, so they
were hung right there next to the burning barn. The militia put a
notice on the tree that they would kill anybody who cut them down,
and as far as the Pinkers knew, nobody yet had or was likely to.

He was nearly two months in recovering and learning how to do
for himself with one arm, and was still skeletally thin when he told
them he had to go. He’d had two ten-dollar gold pieces in his pocket
on the day he’d been shot, and they were still there. He gave one to
the Pinkers in exchange for their old mule, a scrawny beast the Feds
hadn’t thought worth stealing, and he would not let them refuse the
payment for it.

Just before he left, they brought him more bad news. Andy
Blunt’s boys had been caught in the open by two companies of militia and eleven bushwhackers were killed, including Captain Blunt.
The militia was bragging of how they took him back to their camp
and hung him from a tree for two days so everybody could have a
good look at him, then they stripped his body and threw it in a gully
where the crows and wild dogs could feed on it.

“When you see Bloody Bill in Texas,” old man Pinker said, “tell
him nothing he does to these sonofabitches can ever be mean
enough.”

Jack Henry plodded off on the old mule and followed the
Pinkers’ directions to where his two comrades still dangled from the
cottonwood close to the razed barn. The weathered warning sign
was still on the tree. Jack Henry pulled it off and flung in the bushes.
The dead men were but rags and bones anymore, their hides withered stiff and black, their faces long since taken by the crows. But
there was no mistaking Ike Berry’s white hair nor Val Baker’s wild
black tangle. He cut the bodies down and took a lock of each man’s
hair. Then he went to the charred barn and gently kicked through the
ashes and soon enough uncovered Ned Smith’s blackened bones.

“I’m real sorry I couldn’t bury them, Captain,” Jack Henry said.
He gestured with his arm stump as if such explanation might be necessary. “I’m sorry, mam,” he said to Bush. She sat with her hands
folded in her lap and nodded.

He was now on his way to Fort Worth, but had wanted to stop
here to let them know what happened to their fellows, and to hand
over the small portions of them he’d brought back so they might
have something to bury.

He withdrew something from his shirt pocket and handed it to
Bill. “It’s from Ned.’

It looked like a dark stub of a thin cigar. Bill passed it to Bush.
She looked at him in question and he held up and waggled his index
finger. Her lips parted as she understood, and she held the bone as if
it were some rare object of glass.

He had already given Ike’s lock of hair to Butch Berry. When he
got to Fort Worth, he would give Val Baker’s lock to his widow in
Johnson County.

Now Jack Henry was gone, Jim too, and Bush asked Bill if he would
give her some time alone. The drizzle had abated and he went walking in the misted woods, his thoughts mostly of Ike Berry, dear as a
brother, who had died in love with a pretty blonde Union girl he’d
never even met. He’d never had the pleasure of dancing with her,
kissing her, knowing her scent or the feel of her hair. Bill’s fury was
like ice in his belly.

When he got back to the cabin she was sitting as before and he
could see that she’d been crying. She asked him to sit down and please
just listen to her without saying anything until she was finished.

She had been thinking very hard about Ned. At first all she could
think was how much she wanted the men who killed him to die terrible deaths. Her desire for revenge felt like a corset snugged so tight
around her she could hardly draw a proper breath. She had considered giving him a ribbon of her own to put knots in like he did with
Joey’s.

“I’ll do it,” Bill said. “You—”

 

“Please, Bill,” she said. “Just listen.”

 

It was the notion of the ribbon that made her realize she was feeling the same sort of terrible hatred that was always tearing at him,
that seemed to be at large over the whole country like a craziness.
She recalled the things she’d asked about his desire to avenge Joey,
wanting to know if it was even possible to satisfy that desire. Then
she remembered somebody she’d known in the days when she was
living with the Jeffers family in Kansas, a neighbor widow named
Sarah Raulerson, who sometimes came to visit. The Jeffers hated to
see her buggy coming toward the house because they knew what
they were in for. She was never in the house but a short time nor
halfway through with her tea before she began talking of how much
she hated the damned Yankees for killing her husband at the first
Bull Run and how she prayed every night for the Good Lord to strike
dead every Union man, woman and child walking the earth. It was a
lament everyone in the surrounding countryside had heard from her
many times over, and always, as she proceeded in the telling of it, she
became increasingly agitated until she was at once sobbing in her
grief and cursing in her hatred.

Today was the first time she had thought of Sarah Raulerson
since before she’d left Kansas. And as she’d considered the pitiful
memory of Sarah and her bitter anguish, she imagined countless
other women all over the country, Southern women and Yankee
women both, and all of them telling the same story and all crying
their hearts out and all of them cursing countless men and women
and children they did not know, yet hating them so bitterly they
wished them all dead. She imagined them cursing and crying that
way for the rest of their awful lives.