Wildwood Boys (51 page)

They heard of guerrilla bands annihilated by Yankee ambush, of
captured bushwhackers stood against barn walls and shot, or
hanged in the deeper woods and left to rot till they fell free of the
rope and then decomposed into the earth out of which they’d been
raised. They heard of secessionist folk being forced to attend executions of guerrillas and to bury the bodies—or, in some cases of
hanged bushwhackers, to keep watch on the dangling dead men and
report to the Federals anyone who ignored the warnings and cut
them down.

Whichever way the wind did blow, it carried the smell of the
war’s greater malignity.

“You boys hear what Abe Lincoln said after he come off a five-day
drunk?” Sock Johnson poses the question as the column trots along
a hog path through the wildwood.

“All right, I’ll play the fool,” says Fulton the Sailor, riding alongside him. “What’d he say?”

 

“I freed the
who
?”

 

Few of them have heard this one before and the men within
earshot of Johnson all laugh.

 

“I’ll tell you what,” Buster Parr says, “if that bloody-mouthed
son of a bitch ever
did
say that, I’d still want to kill him, but I might
not take as much pleasure in it.”

 

“And if a frog ever
did
grow a pair of wings,” Fletch Taylor says,
“he wouldn’t bump his ass as much.”

At the Saline County farm of a secessionist named Walston, where
they took what by then seemed a lavish supper of beans and fatback
and warm biscuits, they learned that George Todd had come through
only two days before. He was said to be encamped near the mouth of
the Sni-a-bar.

The next day they found him, and the two outfits had a festive
reunion. Todd was in high spirits, and when Bill saw so many of
Quantrill’s men among his company, he knew why. His guess was
confirmed over a jug and a plate of beans.

“It come to a head a few weeks ago,” Todd said. “We were playing seven-up one night and the son of a bitch accused me of cheating.
Truth to tell, I was, but I’d anyway had about enough of him, and if
it hadn’t been the cheating it would’ve been something else, but the
time had come for sure. Bastard always thought he had me buffaloed, but I stood right up and said he could pull his pistol or his
knife, whichever way he wanted to have at it—or he could put his
ass on that crazy damn horse and get out of

him.”
my
camp.” He took a
drink and grinned.

 

“And so?” Bill said.

 

“And so he got on his horse and left. Not twenty men went with

He said Quantrill was now in Howard County, on the north side
of the river, hiding in some deepwoods camp with his meager band.
“I heard he had tooth trouble real bad, had to have a couple cut
out,” Todd said. “Heard he was in some goodly pain. About breaks
my heart, don’t it yours? They say Kate the Cunt’s with him now,
playing nursie.” He never referred to the woman anymore except as
Kate the Cunt.

“Well, she’s your company now,” Bill said. “Congratulations,

Captain Todd.”

 

“Thankee kindly, Captain Anderson.”

 

Dave Pool’s boys had been raising hell from Jackson County to

Saline, Todd told him, and Dick Yeager and his band were somewhere in Chariton. “We bunch up together every now and again,”
Todd said, “mainly me and Pool.” He’d recently met a bushwhacker
captain named Clifton Holtzclaw, whose company of hardcases had
made a fearsome name for themselves all through Boone and
Howard and Cooper counties. “When I told him I knew you, that’s
all he wanted to talk about. It’s like that everydamnwhere we been
for the last three weeks. ‘Bloody Bill did this, Bloody Bill did that.’
Bloody Bill and his scary-ass scalpers. I could get jealous.”

“I’ve heard plenty about your doings lately too, George.”

Todd grinned. “We’re promoting a lot of bad Unionist dreams,
ain’t we? You and me, old son, we’re who the bastards are scared of.”

Letters

 

“And I say we keep it that way,” Bill said, grinning back at him.

 

There was plenty of busthead whiskey on hand and they celebrated late into the night. They told tales and jokes and japed each
other freely around the fires. Sometimes the japing got rough, as
when a Todd man named Tuckett said the company was lucky to
have him in it because he’d been raised in this region of Missouri and
the country was as familiar to him as the feel of his sweetheart’s ass.
“Well hell,” another man said, “by that reckoning, half the company
ought to know its way around here real good.” And the fight was on.

 

At one point in the evening, Frank James stopped by the fire
where Bill and Todd were sitting with some of the other men and
said he wanted Bill to meet a new recruit. He beckoned a young man
forward into the firelight.

 

“I tried my damnedest to warn him off the likes of us but he’s a
willful pup,” Frank said. “All of seventeen years old and reckons he’s
too grown up to heed his older brother anymore.”

 

The boy was young and lean. He tipped his hat and said, “Captain Anderson, I’m proud to ride with you.” His voice was high and
thin.

 

“Another beardless pushhard,” Bill said with a smile. He asked
the boy his name.

 

“Jesse, sir.”

 

“There’s two rules, Jess. Stand by your fellows and don’t ever
bring me a Fed prisoner.”

Came a morning when Jim brought to Bill’s attention an editorial in
one of the Lexington newspapers. It exhorted the local citizens of
town and country to do all in their power to assist the Union army in
overcoming the guerrillas, even to take up arms against them.

“The other Lexington paper did the same thing a few days ago,”
Jim said. “Bad enough we got fewer friends than ever to spare us a
fresh horse or a little food now and then. We sureshit don’t need any
farmers being gulled into believing it’s their patriotic duty to shoot at
us when we show up at their door. Some of them are dumb enough
to do it.”

Bill was incensed. He wrote a lengthy letter and addressed it to
the editors of both papers, upbraiding them, saying that their advice
to the locals was “only asking them to sign their death warrants.”
What the people really wanted, Bill said, was protection from
thieves and robbers, which his men were not. On the contrary, his
guerrillas were the best protection the populace had against such
bandits, who were even more afraid of bushwhackers than they
were of Federals.

He then addressed the locals directly: “Listen to me, fellow-citizens, do not take up arms if you value your lives and property. If you
proclaim to be in arms against the guerrillas I will kill you. I will
hunt you down like wolves and murder you. You cannot escape.” He
smiled at the menacing lines.

Reading over his shoulder, Jim chuckled and said, “That ought
to keep the yokels away from their shotguns.”

 

He sought to make the good folk understand his righteous cause
and see that he was but another victim of the war, a man driven to
his present circumstance by Yankee brutality: “I have chosen guerrilla warfare to revenge myself for wrongs that I could not honorably
avenge otherwise. I lived in Kansas when this war commenced.
Because I would not fight the people of Missouri, my native state, the
Yankees sought my life, but failed to get me. Revenged themselves by
murdering my father, destroying all my property, and have since that
time murdered one of my sisters and kept the other two in jail twelve
months.”

 

On rereading these words, he heard in them the timbre of selfpity, which even as rhetorical device he’d always found disdainful.
The perception so vexed him that he reverted to the minatory mood:
“Take arms against me and you are Federals. Your doctrine is an
absurdity and I will kill you for being fools. Beware, men, before you
make this fateful leap. I feel for you. You are in a critical situation. I
have no time to say anything more to you. Be careful how you act,
for my eyes are upon you.”

 

Boo!
he thought. Jim was grinning large.

 

The letter included an aside to a Colonel McFerran, whom he
ridiculed for his grossly exaggerated lies of victory in a pair of skirmishes with Bill’s company, and one to General Egbert Brown, Commander of the Central District of Missouri, whom he criticized for
the recent jailing of southern women who had assisted guerrillas and
tried to help Confederate prisoners escape:

 

“I do not like the idea of warring with women and children, but
if you do not release all the women you have arrested in Lafayette
County, I will hold the Union ladies in the country as hostages for
them. I will tie them by the neck in the brush and starve them until
they are released. General, do not think I am jesting with you. I will
resort to abusing your ladies if you do not quit imprisoning ours.”

 

He signed, “W. Anderson, Commanding Kansas First Guerrillas.”

 

“You don’t mean it about the women?” Jim said.

 

“If old Egbert really thinks I’m the devil he says I am, maybe he’ll
believe me enough to set the southern ladies loose. I don’t guess it’s
real likely.” He looked up at Jim. “What do you think?”

 

“I think if Momma had named me Egbert, I’d still be wondering
why she hated me so damn much.”

 

Bill laughed. “If she’d named
me
that, I never would’ve answered
to it. She wanted my attention she would’ve had to point and say,
‘Hey, you.’ ”

His letters to Bush and hers to him were no different in their lyrics
from those of any lovers perforce apart—as heavy with the hoary
sentiments and worn banalities of all lovers through the ages, yet no
less precious to either of them, as to any lover, for being so.

His were short and intermittent, as he had told her to expect. He
reminded her to burn each in its turn as soon as she’d read it, the better to avoid all chance of them ever serving as evidence of her complicity with guerrillas. He always wrote of the most recent Federal
abuses in Missouri and rendered pitiful descriptions of the victims,
of families bereaved, of their destroyed properties and ruined crops.
“The countryside sounds of the weeping of new widows and fatherless babes,” he wrote. He entered quick catalogs of the company’s
latest acts of retribution. He would always close with a reminder of
how deeply he loved her and how much he missed her, how he often
dreamt of them embraced in their steaming bathtub by the amber
glow of the fireside, enclosed in their own small portion of the world
and with no need of any of the rest of it. His closing line was ever the
same: “I think of you only when I breathe.”

Her letters contained descriptions of the property in its splendid
summer flowering—the shady creekside bursting with cardinal flowers and creamy morning blooms of rain lilies, the fields thick with
bluebells and spiderwort, the meadows alighting each evening with
buttercups like little pink lamps. She was grateful for the presence of
the Hundley boy, who’d proved a great help in keeping up the place.
She always shared with young Lamar whatever news of the company
and its victories Bill posted in his letters. She said she missed him
more than she could properly express and so would not even try to.
Her closings were an echo of his own: “I think of you only when my
heart beats.”

Across the Muddy

On an early morning hazed with river fog they swam their horses
across the Missouri into Carroll County. Clinging to the saddlehorns, many of the men shivered from cause other than the water’s
chill, having heard since childhood that river mist was inhabited by
the spirits of the drowned. As his horse pulled him sloshing from the
water and onto the bank, Riley Crawford looked near to demented
with fright. He swore he’d felt a hand trying to grab him by the ankle
and pull him under. Some of them laughed at him for a superstitious
child, but others nodded with big-eyed belief and couldn’t distance
themselves from the river fog fast enough.

They made their way to a farm off the main road. Bill kept most of
the men back in the trees while Sock Johnson and Oz Swisby went to
the house. After a time they returned with a man named Hamer,
whose farm it was and who had come along with Sock and Oz thinking he would be aiding a troop of Federals. Then he saw the rest of
the company and the sudden sag of his face bespoke his realization.

He led them to the home of a man named Potts, whose name was
on a list Bill carried. Provided by spies in Carroll County, the list
bore the names of men belonging to the local home guard, an organization that rankled Bill for its overweening notion of itself. “Bunch
of farmers wanting to wear Federal blue and play at war, to be guerrilla killers all day and then go home to a warm supper and a ready
wife.” Fifteen minutes after arriving at the Potts place, the guerrillas
were on their way again, Mrs. Potts’ wails falling faint behind them.

By midafternoon they had visited eight farms and at each one
killed the home guardsman who lived there. The rest of the men on
the list resided in neighboring Chariton County, but Hamer said he
wasn’t very familiar with that region and pleaded to be relieved of
his guide duty.

“All right then, Mr. Hamer,” Bill Anderson said. He affected to
regard his list with hard concentration. “H-A-M-E-R. Is that the correct spelling? Gregory Hamer, of the Sixteenth Missouri Home
Guard that last month burned the home of a Confederate hero who
lost a leg at Vicksburg? Whose wife was bad sick at the time you
boys fired the house and has since died? Whose children now live in
a lean-to?”

Hamer blanched. He half-raised a hand as if he would make a
point, but already Butch Berry was dropping a noose around his
neck and snugging it tight in the same motion, dallying the rope to
his saddlehorn and hupping his horse into a hard sprint, snatching
Gregory Hamer of the Sixteenth Missouri Home Guard off his saddle and out from under his hat. The man bounced flailing and scraping over the ground, losing first one boot and then the other. A
hundred yards down the road, Butch reined up and cut the rope. As
the company trotted past the corpse, they shared amusement at the
sight of its grotesquely attenuated neck.