Wildwood Boys (55 page)

They flung aside their tin plates and some of them rushed to the
door and windows, revolvers drawn. Marlowe had been sufficiently
foresightful to put in a rear door when he built the cabin, and Bill led
the way through it as rifleballs whacked the front of the house.

The rest of the men were running from the barn and taking outside cover, all of them firing into the treeline some hundred yards distant, where the cloud of riflesmoke positioned the Feds. Now the
horseholders came riding up from the ravine, each man of them trailing a half-dozen mounts. Jesse James led the horses that included
Edgar Allan, trailing them by their reins in one hand and firing his
pistol with the other and guiding his own mount with his knees.

The Yankee party must have thought them a smaller bunch,
because when the full company of more than sixty guerrillas was in
view and galloping toward the woods, howling and shooting, the
Federals fled. Jim Anderson led two dozen men in chase for a mile or
so before reining up and watching them vanish over a distant rise.

Their forward scouts—Sock Johnson and Fulton the Sailor—had
sent back no word of lurking Yankee troops, and so Bill had posted
only a single vidette at the treeline, a boy named Robinson. They
found him throatcut in the underscrub.

They bore his body back to the Marlowe place and were quick
about burying him and Oz Swisby in the soft earth behind the house.
Bill gave Marlowe money and told him if they ever disturbed the
remains buried there or reported them to Union troops he would
know it and he would come back and roast the entire family alive.
Marlowe and his wife swore they would keep the graves a secret, but
the daughters made no show of fear at Bill’s threat. He supposed that
they had already seen so much of the world’s meanness—even in
their own faces—to have grown inured to its timbre. Nether one of
them had seemed much affected by the sight of a dead man who had
politely thanked them for dinner a half-hour earlier.

They found their scouts two miles away where the road passed
through a dense tree hollow. The head of Fulton the Sailor rested on
a knee-high tree stump at the side of the road and his body hung by
its feet from a branch of a nearby elm. Some waggish Yank had
inserted a corncob pipe between Fulton’s teeth so that he appeared to
be grinning around it in spite of the flies trafficking in his mouth and
eyes.

But Fulton could not hold their attention against the spectacle of
Socrates Johnson. The things they had seen in the course of this war
had made quaint the notion of shock, but here the Yankees did succeed in capturing their attention. From four different trees dangled
Johnson’s quartered portions. The bolder crows had persisted at their
clustered feedings on the rent and dripping flesh until Butch Berry
fired a shot to disperse them into the higher branches, where they
perched and glowered at the intruders and squalled their protests.

“That’s how they used to kill people back in the olden days,”
Frank James said. “When they wanted to make a lasting impression
on anybody who might be thinking to follow a wayward path.”

“Looks like it makes a pretty lasting impression on the fella who
gets it done to him too,” Hi Guess said.

Darling wife—

 

Fulton the Sailor had been popular with the company, Sock
Johnson fairly venerated. Sock had been Jenny’s great favorite, Bill
remembered, and had doted on her like a darling daughter. His
hands began to pain, and he eased his grip on the saddlehorn.

 

“That’s four good men we lost today and two of them butchered
and we’ve put down not one goddam Fed in return,” Butch Berry
said. He spat hard and his off eye looked wild. “I say we got a big
bill to collect.”

 

They buried the men deep among the trees and then found
heavy broken branches to put on the graves to keep off the larger
scavengers.

I am weary with my own rage, from which there is no
respite but my dreams of you. How I miss you, my lovely
girl! In my dreams the scents of your skin and your hair are
so real that I am shocked, on waking, to discover I am not
with you. Shocked,—and remanded to my fury....

They crossed down into Boone County, every man of them
aching to encounter Federals or any man who did support the Union,
but by sundown they had met none. Bill was about to call a halt for
the night when Butch and his scouts reported that George Todd and
Dave Pool were encamped with their companies on the farm of a
man named Singleton a few miles to southward. Butch had taken a
drink with them, and they sent word that Bill’s company was welcome to put down in their camp.

They sat around the fires under a starbright sky showing a skullwhite
shard of moon in the west. Todd had no news of Price’s Army of
Missouri, but was as curious as Bill about where Pap might be and
what he would have the guerrillas do in service of his invasion. He
gave no sign of still being disgruntled with Bill, but he made no mention of Quantrill, which Bill took as evidence of his persisting displeasure toward the man. Todd was saddened to learn of the men Bill
had lost at Marlowe’s farm, and was wroth to hear of their mutilations. Dave Pool had been close friends with Sock Johnson and was
almost tearful in his sulfurous cursing of the Yanks. At every fire in
the camp, the wildwood boys spoke in hard voices of the barbarities
committed on their fellows.

They passed a restless night, tossing in their blankets, cursing
low, muttering their maledictions to imagined auditors. Bill slept not
at all but stared at the stars all night and felt his heart like some
becrazed creature banging on the bars of its cage.

In the morning their mood was still smoldering. Feeling restless
and craving to know where Price and his army might be, Bill
mounted up with thirty men and asked Todd where the nearest town
lay. Todd pointed down the southward trail. “About three miles yonderway. Place called Centralia.”

Vae victus

The town stood on a stretch of rolling prairie three miles from the
Singleton farm. It was little more than a stageline waystation and a
whistle stop on the North Missouri Railroad, a hamlet of some hundred residents, comprising a depot, a freight house, a general store,
some two dozen houses, and two hotels. On this late Tuesday morning of bright sun and few clouds, the smell of dust on the air, thirty
men of the Kansas First Guerrillas, all of them dressed in Federal
blue, trotted their horses down the street.

A dog barked nearby. A rooster crowed. People on the sidewalks
paused to watch the horsemen pass. Those in the street hastened out
of their way.

Arch Clement glanced around with a scowl and said, “Look at
them. I’ll wager the war’s never touched this place.”

 

Behind him, Jim Anderson said, “They probably think the war’s
but a rumor.”

 

“Todd says the place is Unionist to a man,” Butch said.

 

Bill reined up in the middle of the street and studied the town. A
small group of men was gathered on the porch of the Eldorado
House, the nearest of the two hotels, and all of them were regarding
the arrivals in Union blue. One of them stepped up to the porch rail
and called out, “What outfit are ye boys with?”

 

Bill made no answer but only stared at the man until he made an
awkward shrug and turned away. Some of the others retreated into
the hotel.

 

“That’s all they do, the likes of them, gawk and talk,” Bill said.
He spat. “I don’t see a man of them missing an eye or arm or leg, but
I’ll wager there’s not a pair of balls on that porch.” He thought of
Sock Johnson suspended from the various trees, of Fulton the
Sailor’s disembodied head made an object of jest. His anger of the
day before had not at all eased in the night, and now, sleepless and
raw-eyed, he squinted against the risen sun’s tormenting glare off the
glass windows and the pale street.

 

“Damn them,”
he said. “Sack the place.”

 

Jim and Arch gave quick orders and the morning was shattered
with rebel yells. Some of the men dismounted and ran into the freight
house while others heeled their horses into a gallop and raced
through the town, taking possession of every good horse they came
on, shooting in the air and at everything of glass in sight, laughing at
the people scattering like spooked chickens, at the shrieks of the
women yanking their children to them and fleeing into their houses.
Some went straight for the general store and made short work of
looting it, smashing out the front windows with flung bolts of cloth,
overturning shelves of goods, cutting open tins of peaches and apple
sauce, oysters and salmon, slurping the contents on the spot. They
stomped into the two hotels and robbed every guest. One man
offered to protest and Frank James broke his nose with a pistol barrel and no one else even thought to resist.

 

Bill Anderson cantered Edgar Allan up and down the street, relishing the feel of a proper meanness toward this town that had the
audacity to think itself exempt from the war.

 

There came gleeful whoopings from the freight house, where the
men had discovered an untapped barrel of whiskey. They rolled it out
on the platform, set it upright and broke open the top. A carton of tin
cups was produced from one of the stores and the bushwhackers
were shoving each other aside in their eagerness to dip into the barrel
and gulp the whiskey like water. Somebody found a case of new
boots and Dave Pool had the clever idea to tie a pair together by the
straps and hang them over his saddle and then fill them with whiskey.
“Bedamn if that ain’t a sage use of bootleg,” Buster Parr said. Others
were already putting the rest of the boots to the same use.

 

Now an outcry at the end of the street announced the arrival of
the stagecoach from Columbia. As it rolled up to the Boone Hotel,
it was surrounded by bushwhackers ordering the passengers to
alight. The terrified driver pled not to be shot as a pair of bushwhackers clambered aboard and began rummaging through the topside luggage. The passengers stepped down and were quickly
relieved of their pocketbooks. When they learned who was robbing
them, one man said, “Why steal from
us
? We’re southern men, same
as you.”

 

“Bullshit you are,” Hi Guess said. “If you were good southern
men, you’d be wearing the gray or riding with us.”

 

Even as they went about their plunder, they kept a steady traffic
to the whiskey barrel. Bill sat his horse and accepted a cup of spirits
handed up by Arch Clement. They were toasting each other when
there sounded a high keen whistle from down the track.

 

Archie’s teeth showed hugely. “Bedamn if our luck ain’t made of
gold!”

 

It was the noon train from Saint Louis headed for Saint Joe—
three passenger coaches and an express and baggage car. As it
rounded into view of the depot, the guerrillas had already converged
on the track and were heaving heavy wooden ties across the rails.
The train came to a shrilling, steaming halt a dozen yards shy of the
barrier. The wildwood boys swarmed aboard and kicked off the
engineer and brakemen and stormed into the coaches, shooting into
the ceilings, demanding everyone’s money and jewelry.

 

Accompanied by Butch and the James brothers, Bill went directly
to the express car and ordered the agent to open the safe. It yielded
more than three thousand dollars, which Bill handed in a sack to
young Jesse for guardianship. Breaking open the baggage in the car,
Frank James discovered a suitcase holding more than ten thousand
dollars in greenbacks. When Bill and the others looked to see what
he was laughing at, they too had to grin.

 

“Sweet baby Jesus,” Jesse said, beaming at the others. “I ain’t
never had no fun!”

 

Arch Clement appeared at the car door, showing his peculiar
smile. “Captain Bill, you’ll want to see this.”

 

Bill followed him past the passengers who’d been forced off the
train and stood in fearful clusters in front of the stationhouse. They
went up the steps of one of the coaches, and the pair of bushwhackers posted at the door stepped aside for them. Arch swept a hand
into the coach like he was presenting a stage act and said, “Behold!”

 

In the coach were twenty-three Federal soldiers with not a gun
among them and every face hanging like a mourner’s. Two bushwhackers stood at the far end of the coach, holding Colts in both
hands and grinning at Bill.

 

“These gents are on furlough,” Arch told Bill. “They were bold
enough to admit they are men of General Sherman. They were with
him in Atlanta.”

 

“Houseburners and well poisoners,” Bill said. “Killers of mules
and dogs and old men. Violators of women. Silverware thieves.
That’s what I hear about the bummers of crazy Sherman’s outfit. The
only thing of worth about you sonsofbitches is your uniforms. Get
them off.”

 

The Yanks stood up and began to strip.

 

Watching them jostling each other as they shed their uniforms,
Bill Anderson felt a sudden and discomfiting tiredness that had nothing to do with muscle and bone. More a weariness of purpose. A faltering of tenacity.
How many?
Bush had asked.
For how long?
He
had a momentary vision of shooting each man of them in the knee
and letting it go at that.

 

And then one of the Federals said, “Dammit, Wallace, watch
your elbow!”

 

A short soldier was rubbing his eye and glaring at the big Yank
beside him. A big man with a thick brown beard.

 

Wallace. With a beard
.

 

“Say now, Wallace,” Bill said, “you ever been in the Nations,
nearabouts the Red?”

 

Wallace gawked at him in surprise at being addressed by name.
“No sir, I never.”

 

Wallace with a beard.
Bill’s incipient uncertainty gave way to
revived rage.