Wildwood Boys (5 page)
The Berry boys made quiet inquiries, and over time they learned
the names of the trio of jayhawks who had ganged on Alston Berry.
On a dark night a month after their father’s maiming, they hid themselves in the bushes beside the Emporia house of one of those men.
When he passed by a lamplighted parlor window they fired their
Sharps rifles and the thunderous muzzle flares illumined the bushes
and the pair of .52-caliber bullets removed the top portion of the
man’s head and slapped it across the wall in a scarlet paste of hairy
bone and brain. As the brothers ran through the shadows to their
tethered horses they heard the rising screams of the man’s wife and
children.
Three weeks later they set up in the brush alongside the trace
leading from Americus to the wooded cabin of another of the three
jayhawkers. When the man came riding along in the last of the
evening twilight they hupped their horses out onto the trail and
forced him to rein up. The man thought they were highwaymen and
said they would be fools to rob one of Jim Montgomery’s men. If
they had any sense at all they’d ride away right now and never show
themselves to him again. Angelfaced Ike Berry smiled at him, his
lank pale hair hanging to his collar. “Mister,” he said, “we
you won’t never see us again.” Then brought his Sharps up and shot
him in the belly and the man went off his mount as though he’d been
yanked from behind by a pullrope. They walked their horses to
where he lay moaning in the grass, hugging himself tight, his knees
drawn up. Butch Berry had his five-shooter in hand. He said “Hey!”
and the man cast his eyes up and Butch shot him in the head.
The third man they were denied. He was killed in a drunken
brawl in Topeka before they could attend to him.
of their daddy. He suggested they join him and his sons in the horsebrokering business. The Berry boys didn’t have to think about it.
They said they’d be proud to ride with them. Then proved quick to
learn the trade and fearless in the practice of it.
Shortly after the first frost of autumn Alston Berry woke his wife
with a strangled cry in the middle of the night and she fired the lamp
in time to see his last breath rising palely on the chill air. The Andersons helped to bury him under a wide oak overlooking Wabaunsee
Creek on a day denied all color by a leaden sky. Ike Berry read the
passage from Matthew his mother had selected wherein men are
reminded that the Almighty makes His sun rise on both the evil and
the good and sends down His rain on the just and the unjust alike.
The next day the Widow Berry announced she’d had enough of
Kansas and Missouri too and was going home to Cross County,
Arkansas, where she was born and still had plentiful kin. She would
take both daughters with her. The Berry boys bought a covered
wagon and an ox team and paid for a place for it in a small wellguarded train taking hides and corn and other goods to Saint Louis
for shipment down to New Orleans. Their mother would sell the
wagon in Saint Louis and then steam down to Memphis and ferry
over to Arkansas. On a cold blue November morn, Ike and Butch
stood at the trailside and waved goodbye to their mother and sisters
as the teamsters cracked their whips and the train clattered into
motion and the Berry boys never saw their women kin again.
As he’d grown to manhood Bill Anderson had naturally become
acquainted with various farm girls of the region and he now and
again enjoyed sportings with many of them. On two occasions, however, each with a different girl, an outraged father had suddenly
come stalking into the barn in a rush of curses and brandishing a
shotgun, and Bill had both times been obliged to take flight with
pants in hand—once leaping from the loading door to a full haywagon below, the other time shinning down a ready rope, both times
his good Edgar Allan saddled and waiting behind the barn. He was
twenty and the girl fifteen on the second of these instances and it had
been a very near thing. He forevermore would carry five blue shotscars on his right buttock as a consequence of it. He enlisted his
brother’s raw doctoring skills to extract the pellets and repaid him
for the service with a detailed account of the adventure.
Jim was sixteen by then and still untried with a woman, and he
ached to remedy that sorrowful state. It happened that Bill had
recently met a pair of sisters in Agnes City and needed somebody to
occupy the one while he gave his attentions to the other, and so the
first time he got together with the Reedy girls his brother was with
him. Jim had afterward blathered about the experience so happily
and at such length as he and Bill rode for home through the sunrisereddening woods that Bill finally reached out and yanked his
brother’s hat down over his eyes and said that if he was going to keep
talking so damn silly he might as well look it too.
They had been paying periodic visits to the Reedys for nearly two
years now. The sisters had survived a smallpox plague in childhood
that struck their whole family at once and carried off their father and
enfeebled their mother and robbed her of all interest in the remaining
world. The disease had left the girls with badly scarred faces, but
they were both fullbreasted and slim of waist and so enthusiastic for
sexual play that Bill and Jim hardly noticed their disfigurements. The
girls helped their mother run a small cafe in Agnes City and lived
with her in the upstairs flat. Every now and then Bill would get word
to them that he and Jim would be in town on a given evening, and
after the cafe closed and their mother shut herself in her room for the
night, the girls would slip out and meet them in the alley below. They
would repair to a spot beside a creek in the nearby woods and there
put down blankets and share a bottle and generally have a fine time
until just before dawn when they’d put their clothes back on and kiss
goodbye until their next tryst.
Each time the brothers returned home from one of these all-night
gambols, everybody at the breakfast table knew what they’d been up
to. Their mother would fix them with accusatory tightlipped stares
while their father grinned and usually made some remark about the
rough day’s work ahead for anybody who might not have had his
proper rest the night before. Their eldest sister Mary could never
help smiling either, even as she shook her head at them, and twelveyear-old Jenny would grin and waggle an admonishing finger.
Of their sisters, only Josephine, now fourteen, was unamused by
their tomcat times in town, though she never expressed her disapproval vocally but rather by ignoring the two of them utterly for the
duration of the breakfast meal.
On the dawn following their most recent night of sporting with the
Reedys, the brothers arrived home still chuckling about their good
time. They continued to talk about the frolic as they unsaddled Buck
and Edgar Allan and rubbed them down and forked hay into their
stalls and occasionally glanced toward the house lest their mother or
one of their sisters be coming to fetch them and overhear their salacious talk and jesting. As they started out of the stable they heard a
soft rustle around the corner and they pulled their Colts and ran out
and saw Josephine dashing for the woods with her skirt hiked to her
knees.
Bill Anderson stared out at the woods where she’d vanished into
the shadows. “I guess,” he said. He holstered his pistol and headed
for the woods.
Jim watched him go. The whole family had long known that Bill
and Josephine shared a singular kinship that excluded the rest of the
world, but only Jim knew just how special that kinship had become.
From the time she was an infant Josephine had taken a special comfort from Bill that no one else could give her, not even their mother.
She could be strident with crying and refusing Martha’s teat and then
eight-year-old Bill would take her up in his arms and she would
immediately fall quiet and stare up at him in bright-eyed rapture.
From earliest childhood she owned an independence of spirit and
freedom of expression that sometimes prompted Will Anderson to
threats of stropping her with a belt for her sass, though he never
made good on them. Her mother, however, did sometimes order her
to stand with her nose in a corner as a penance for her disrespect.
Josephine could be scathing with her sisters, could drive Mary to a
shrieking rage and little Jenny to tears—and yet every neighbor child
learned early that to speak ill of either sister in Josie’s earshot was to
risk a severe thrashing.
Her only object of veneration was ever and always Bill. She loved
Jim dearly and was never a smart-mouth with him except in obvious
playfulness that he clearly enjoyed, but whenever Bill was nearby she
had eyes for him alone. As she grew older she hurried through her
daily chores so she could offer to help with his, or at least sit by and
watch him tend to them. She hung on his words, was avid to learn
whatever he would teach her about the ways of the woods and skies
and rivers, about animals and people, about the Walker Colt she so
admired. No discussion on any point however trivial could start up
at the supper table but she would immediately cast her vehement
opinion on Bill’s side and only his raised finger signaling her to hush
would save her from yet another session in the corner.
She liked to show him how strong she was by toting his tools or,
as she grew bigger, by helping him to heft rocks or trim timber for a
new fence. She showed off her good wit by memorizing some of the
poetry he liked so well. He might be shirtless and dripping sweat and
hammering out a red-hot horseshoe and she would sit close by and
entertain him with renditions of his favorite poems. He would pause
in his labor and applaud her at the end of each performance and she
would beam proudly. Sometimes he joined her in the recitations as he
worked, and sometimes Jim would be working with him and would
chime in as well, all of them dramatically intoning passages about
Poe’s Annabelle Lee or Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner.
Whenever he finished with some stretch of hard work she hastened to him with a towel and would insist on drying him herself.
She could not get enough of touching him. From the time she was a
small child she missed no opportunity to sit on his lap and cling to
his neck and put her head on his chest. She had only just learned to
walk the first time he placed her feet on top of his and danced her
about the porch. She was four years old when he set her astraddle in
front of him on a horse and held her tight to his chest as they galloped over the countryside and she had laughed with exultation as
her hair flew back in his face. By the time she was twelve she could
ride better than any woman and most men in the region, but she still
delighted to have Bill swing her up in front of him on Edgar Allan
and hold her tight and go riding tandem.
Although physically brave, she was from earliest childhood given
to inexplicable anxieties. She was only five when a fierce winter
storm woke her one midnight and upset her so much that she eased
out of the bed she shared with her sisters in the loft and silently
descended the ladder into the room where her parents slept and went
out into the freezing wind in the dogtrot and then into the other
room that contained the kitchen and the dining table and where her
brothers slept on narrow bunks against the wall. She got under the
covers with Bill and there slept snugly with her face nestled against
his neck. The next morning her big sister Mary joshed her for a
fraidycat and everybody grinned but she didn’t care.
She thereafter made her way to Bill’s bed every time she wakened
in a late-night fright. Will and Martha were aware of this new practice from its start but only shrugged at it since the comfort she took
from a night with Bill seemed also to ease her usual fantods and
make her less inclined to sassiness—sometimes for weeks at a time. If
cuddling to her big brother could calm her that much, it was fine
with them. For his part, thirteen-year-old Bill didn’t mind at all.
“That girl puts out heat like a pony stove,” he said at the breakfast
table one morning after an ice storm had howled at the doors and
windows through the night. He smiled at her and tousled her hair.
“You’re better than my own private hotbrick, girl.” She grinned and
grinned. But even when spring and summer came on, the nights were
never too warm to discomfort him when thunderclaps brought her
scooting to his bunk.
In the years after they moved to Kansas she continued to make
her way to Bill whenever she had such fearful night wakings, and
their parents seemed still to think little of it. Then one morning at
breakfast Will Anderson looked up from his ham steak and cornbread just as Josephine leaned over the table to refill his coffee mug
and the front of her dress drooped to disclose small but ripely
rounded breasts with nipples like raspberries. He cut his eyes to his
breakfast to hide his rush of embarrassment. Later that morning he
asked Martha how old the girl was now and was surprised to hear
she was already thirteen—and then envisioned her breasts once
again and marveled that thirteen was all she was. He didn’t know
what to think. In this day and part of the world, wives of sixteen
were not uncommon, brides of fifteen hardly unknown. Martha
sensed what was troubling him and confided that she had lately
begun to wonder about Josie’s habit of going to Bill’s bed whenever
she had the nightspooks.
“She’s a child no longer, William,” she said. “And Bill’s for some
time been a man. It ought to quit.”
Bill about it.
they were alone and then told Bill about his mother’s concern regarding Josephine.