Wildwood Boys (50 page)

She had been looking at her hands in her lap as she spoke, but
now she looked up at him and her aspect was utter resolution.

 

“I wish you weren’t going back to it,” she said. “I wish it more
than I ever wished for anything. If I thought there was some way to
stop you, I’d do it. You’ll do what you must, but I want you to know
that every minute you’re away I’ll be hoping that you’ll change your
mind and quit that damned war and come home to me. I don’t care
about the war or who wins or who loses or for revenging Ned or for
anything else. I care about
you
. But I swear to you, Bill, I
swear
I will
not be another Sarah Raulerson. Whatever happens, I will not live
the rest of my life with nothing to it but weeping and hating. I will
not.”

 

She stood up and came to him and kissed him fully on the
mouth.

 

He wanted to tell her that he understood, but before he could
speak she put her fingers to his lips and said, “No, please. It will all
go as it goes.”

 

Then she grinned and said, “And where I think it should go right
now is directly to the bed over there. What do you think, Captain?”

 

He laughed and swept her up and to it.

***

 

Two weeks later, Bill’s scouts reported that Quantrill had departed
the Indian Nations for Missouri, and George Todd and his band had
gone with him.

Bill told Jim they’d be moving out themselves in two days, but
the day before they were to leave, there came a hard storm and the
rain did not let up for five days and the country turned to mud. Bill
said there was no need to set out in such dismal weather, they’d wait
till things dried out a little. But the rain kept coming, off and on, and
the mud remained, and for the next ten days the men were miserably
wet and daily more restless, their tempers drawn to such fine edge
that every day saw several fistfights. The horses stamped and lunged
in the corrals, as tense and agitated as the men, as ready to go.

He spent every hour of the delay in the private company of his
wife. They were touching each other constantly, stroking, caressing,
holding close. They spoke little for there was little need. He snipped
a lock of her hair and bound it with a sturdy thread and kept it in his
shirt pocket. He said he would write to her when he could and send
the letters by one of his men, but there was no telling how regularly
he could do it or if the rider would get through to her—and if he did,
whether the carrier would get back to Bill with her letter in turn. She
said she would expect no letters from him at all. That way, any she
received would come as a grand surprise.

She had attached a clasp to her brother’s fingerbone and wore it
as a brooch on her breast. Few of those to see it in years to come
would realize on sight what the ornament was made of. “Now I have
you both close to my heart,” she said, one hand fingering the brooch,
the other the necklace locket in which she carried Bill’s photograph.
She had turned the picture upside down in deference to the superstition that such was a way to make sure an absent lover kept you in his
thoughts.

Bill asked Jim to pick somebody to stay behind and watch over
Bush and help her with the heavier chores, and Jim selected a fifteenyear-old recruit named Lamar Hundley. The boy at first protested,
saying he wanted to go to Missouri too, that he could kill Yankees as
good as any man. But when Jim said that Captain Anderson had
specifically asked for

him
to be his wife’s protector in his absence, the
boy said oh well, all right then, and could not keep from beaming.
He swore to keep Miss Bush safe from all harm and do her bidding
without question.

At last came a sunwashed morning when they embraced on the
porch and Bill kissed her and she put her hand to his face in farewell.
Then he descended the steps and mounted Edgar Allan and led his
men away.

V
The Casualties
6
1864

 

Of rain and river crossings

They had four days of fair weather after they crossed the Red, and
then the sun once more gave way to a dark and rumbling sky and
they did not see sunshine again for three weeks. All through the first
week they were beset by daily storms of furious thunderclaps and
bright serpent tongues of lightning that sometimes struck trees in
shimmering pale blasts and terrorized men and horses and left the
trees smoking. The wind heaved hard and cold and slung the rain
sideways. The horses cried at its whipping sting in their eyes and the
men rode with heads bent against it. Their greatest effort was at
keeping the breeches of their firearms dry. They held their hats to
their heads and their clothes were plastered to them and their boots
were heavy with water.

The storms at last ceded to a steady rain that sometimes came
down hard and straight for hours—clattering in the trees and crackling on the risen waters of the bottoms and the swales, drumming on
the men’s hats and streaming off their brims—and sometimes eased
to a misty drizzle. The noon skies looked like churned lead. The
horses were spooked by sudden blooms of blue fire at the metal of
their harness, by blue streaks on the gun barrels. “Saint Elmo’s fire,”
a bushwhacker named Fulton called it. He’d been an able seaman on
a merchant ship and had often witnessed the phenomenon—but after
one too many harrowing storms on the high seas, he’d chosen to put
as much distance as possible between himself and Mother Ocean and
therefore moved to Missouri.

Their pace was plodding through the deep mud. They could not
raise a campfire in that sodden world, could only lie rolled in their
drenched blankets on the highest ground they could find and sleep
fitfully if at all and shiver through the long nights of solid gloom. Bill
heard Sock Johnson muttering to no one in particular that he would
go back to religion if Lord Jesus would let him at least

remember
what it felt like to be dry.

They forded the Spring River into Missouri in the last days of
May, under an afternoon sky the color of old tin that showed but a
vague paling where the sun might be. This stonebottom ford was
rarely more than a foot deep but now the water was up to the horses’
bellies and running fast. They slogged their slow and careful way up
into Vernon County and the border district razed by General Order
11. Ike Berry had been killed somewhere this side of the Marmaton
River and who knew whether his bones yet lay under the hanging
tree where Jack Henry had left them or if they had been scattered by
scavengers or perhaps come upon by Christians and properly
interred. Butch Berry was riding as the forward scout and out of
sight of the rest of the company, but Bill Anderson knew what dark
thoughts must be writhing in the boy’s head.

The border district had become even more of a wasteland than
they had witnessed the previous summer. In this season of relentless
rain the gray countryside was as ghostly as the column of riders moving through it like forty-one maledict shades. The ruins and deserted
farms looked like relics of a time far more distant than last year.
With exception of Jackson County, the war on the border was fairly
well done with. There was nothing or no one left here to fight for.
The war had moved downriver into the central counties flanking
both sides of the Muddy, and toward that new badland did Bill
Anderson lead his men.

Every river crossing was more perilous than the one before, the
ferries even more dangerous than swimming the horses across, which
they did at the Marmaton. Most of the bushwhackers couldn’t swim,
and so clung wide-eyed and desperate to the saddlehorns. They
crossed the same way at the wider and faster Osage, but this time
some of the horses panicked badly and one broke loose of its rider
midway across the river. The men nearest him caught a quick last
glimpse of the boy’s white face as the spuming brown current
whirled him off and pulled him under and he never made outcry. He
was new to the company and none knew anything of him except that
his name was Hammett, but whether it was his Christian name or
surname was a point of debate. No part of him would ever surface
except for his slouch hat, which an old Negro would find caught in
the bankside roots of a willow two miles downstream and get good
use of for the rest of his days.

The South Grand was booming so fiercely they dared not try to
swim the horses and instead rode five miles upriver until they came
to a wooden bridge. It was wide enough for a wagon, but the structure was worn to such frailty they could see it trembling with the
force of the rushing water. They tested its endurance one rider at a
time, every horse white-eyed at the sway and quiver of the planks
underfoot. Bill was the last man to go over. By then the bridge was
shaking so badly he’d had to keep a tight rein on Edgar Allan and
talk to him all the way across.

At last the rain ceased altogether. The clouds broke apart and a
glaring afternoon sun reflected so brightly silver on the wet world
around that they were forced to squint against it all the rest of that
day as they plugged on through the heavy mud and dripping woodlands.

New blood

Some days later and just before dawn, Butch Berry reported an outfit
of thirty militiamen encamped a few miles to northward. Bill led the
company at a lope and in single file along a hog trail through the
thickest part of the woods and they came to a brushy rise overlooking the militia camp just as the sun was beginning to redden the trees.
Butch sneaked up on foot behind one of the pickets and the dozing
man did not have time to be surprised when an arm snaked around
his throat and a knifeblade slid through his backribs into his heart.
At the same time, Buster Parr was bringing down the other picket on
the far side of the camp.

A quarter of an hour later, twenty-four militiamen lay dead
under a drifting blackpower haze and only six of their fellows had
escaped the sudden storm of wildwood boys. Arch Clement and
Butch Berry took three scalps each, and fresh Federal hair hung from
Buster Parr’s boottops. Riley Crawford began putting together a new
ear necklace, but he was chased away from some of the bodies by the
bushwhackers who’d killed them and wanted the ears for themselves. Bill formed three new knots in Josie’s ribbon. The guerrillas
stripped the dead men of their uniforms, complaining of the blood
they would have to wash out of them. They left the litter of naked
bodies to bloat under the rising sun, then sat to the militia breakfast
still warm at the cookfires—coffee and hoecakes and bacon and
beans, their first hot meal since Texas.

A sunbright morning of pale sky and thin shreds of rose clouds.
Flowering dogwoods draped in white, crabapples in pink. Crows tittering at irate mockingbirds, watchful of a hawk at high spiral.
Fields flooded yellow with black-eyed Susan. The scent of dog fennel
on the soft wind.

They were navigating eastward, moving at a trot, bridle rings
chinking and hooffalls thudding the ripe earth, scouts out right and
left, all of them now in Federal blue. Butch Berry far ahead on point.

And then Butch was loping back down the trail to them. “Yanks
coming. Fifty.”

 

As the two companies came in sight of each other, Bill raised his
hand in greeting, one Yank officer hallooing another from a distance.
They closed to within ten yards before the Yank captain’s face
showed suspicion and he caught sight of Bill’s long hair and the scalp
on his bridle. He had just enough time remaining to him in this
world to look sad before Bill’s bullet passed through his neck and
sent him sprawling from the saddle. Then all the guerrillas were
pouring fire into them and twenty-two Federals littered the ground
after the rest had fled the smoky field.

 

The wounded pled for quarter. Arch Clement stood over one and
said, “Ah, Yank, don’t beg, it’s just too pitiful”—and shot the man at
such close range the Federal’s hair smoked from the powderblast.

 

Butch Berry went from one fallen blue to another, seeking any
who still breathed, and the three he found might have been entreating a deaf man for all the heed he paid them before cutting their
throats.

So it went through June and into July. Where they found no Feds to
fight, they did whatever mischief they might to harass Union operations. They cut telegraph lines, burned bridges on the Yank supply
routes, felled huge trees across army wagon roads. They posted
themselves along the wooded riverbanks and shot up passing steamboats. The Union controlled the Missouri newspapers, of course,
and editorials across the state thundered with outrage at guerrilla
“barbarisms” and lauded every act of Federal “reprisal.” The guerrillas were not soldiers, nor even men. They were savages, brute creatures as far removed from Christian notions of honorable warfare as
wild Indians, entirely deserving of extermination, and editorials from
Kansas City to Saint Louis called for Union forces to rid the country
of them by any means necessary.

They mostly stayed south of the Missouri River in those weeks of
early summer, roaming the hills and vales and woodlands of Johnson
and Lafayette and Saline counties. Though they did not know that
territory as well as the border country most of them called home,
they knew it well enough. Nor did they lack for friends in this region
to feed and shelter them, to give them news of other guerrilla companies and information about Federal movements.

Some of the other bushwhacker bands were not faring so well.
Every few days the Anderson men came on yet another woodland
gravesite where a body—sometimes several—had been buried in
such haste that a hand or foot still jutted from the freshly turned
ground. Some of the shallow graves were laid open, the scavengers
having already been there and fed on the carrion, the flies still thick
and droning, the crows heavy in the trees, and the ragged guerrilla
shirts of the moldering remains were sufficient testament to who
they’d been and how they came to be there.