Wildwood Boys (56 page)

 

“Get them outside,” he said to Arch. “Over by the store.”

 

Townfolk and passengers watched the Yanks file off the train in
their underwear. Arch ordered them to form a double rank alongside
the general store.

 

“We need one for Wyatt,” he said, and Bill nodded. One of their
comrades, Cave Wyatt, was a Federal prisoner in Columbia, and Bill
wanted to trade for him.

 

Bill mounted Edgar Allan and hupped the horse up in front of
the double rank of Federals and asked if there was a sergeant among
them. No man spoke up. Bushwhackers had formed up to either side
of him, most of them with a pistol in one hand and a cup of whiskey
in the other, all of them well drunk now and cursing the prisoners in
rankly obscene terms—calling them fuckers of their own mothers,
cornholers of their sisters, practiced suckers of pizzles, avid eaters of
shit. Mothers covered their children’s ears.

 

“Are you sure none of you is a sergeant?” Bill said.

 

A Federal stepped forward and gave his name as Sergeant Tom
Goodman. “If you’re gonna shoot the sergeants, there’s only me. So
do it and be damned.”

 

Bill smiled. “Brave last words, Sergeant. But save them for
another day.” He motioned for Jim to take the man aside.

 

Seeing that Goodman was not going to be harmed the other Federals became more hopeful. Even the locals and the train passengers
breathed more easily.

 

“Wallace, step out!” Bill called, and the bearded man hastened
forward, face brightly expectant that he would be put aside with
Goodman. “Right here, Captain,” he said.

 

“Here’s your parole,” Bill said—and drew his Navy and shot him
through the eye.

 

Before the others could even start to beg for their lives, Arch
Clement shot one in the heart—and then the other guerrillas opened
fire.

 

Federals spun and staggered and left their feet as they were hit by
bullets. They sprawled kicking and writhing. They fell against the
building wall and slid to the ground, painting red streaks on the clapboard. Some of the wounded tried to crawl from the scene, though
where they might be thinking to go defied all speculation. Whatever
dream of life yet clung in their heads was ended at pointblank range.

 

The prolonged crackling of revolvers raised a great cloud of
white gunsmoke to waft on the easy breeze which carried too the
screams of the perishing Yankees and the shrieks of women standing
witness to their slaughter.

 

A single Yank was able to get away from the execution ground,
breaking through the line of guerrillas and absorbing no fewer than
seven bullets as he went. He made it to the depot and scrambled so
far under the low crawlspace that the guerrillas could not make him
out in its darkness. They took turns hunkering and coaxing at the
crawlspace, assuring him that if he came out they would not harm
him further. Archie Clement promised they would write to Lincoln
himself and say he deserved a damn medal, deserved to be a general.
The man made no answer. So they set the building afire and after
some minutes he came crawling out, his underwear sagging with
blood. They loudly cheered his pluck. And then shot him dead.

 

They ordered the train crew to pull the ties off the tracks, then
torched the coaches and made the engineer get the locomotive rolling
and hop off, letting the train go on its own, the smoke of the flaming
cars churning high and black to mingle with the smoke of the blazing
depot.

 

And then they departed, laughing and singing, taking with them
a small collection of good horses, boots of sloshing whiskey hanging
from their saddles, new Federal uniforms rolled behind their cantles,
wallets crammed with tins of foodstuff.

 

They would never make the trade of Goodman for Wyatt. The
Yankee sergeant would be their prisoner for ten days, and then, during a crossing of the Missouri River near Boonville, effect his escape.
He was the only Federal ever taken prisoner by Bloody Bill Anderson
who lived to tell of it, and for years afterward he would rarely have
to pay for his own drinks

Two hours later a pall of smoke still hung over Centralia and its litter of executed Federals when Union Major A.V.E. Johnson arrived
at the head of his mounted infantry troop. He found residents and
stranded travelers alike still gawking on the dead or wandering
about like halfwits displaced into an alien geography.

The major was horrified and outraged in equal parts by the
slaughter of the Federals. On learning that there had been but thirty
men in the guerrilla band and that its leader was Bill Anderson—the
very man he was under orders to hunt for in Boone County—he was
determined to run them to ground immediately, never mind the
warnings of those who’d heard the bushwhackers say there were
many more of their fellows in a nearby camp. Johnson left twentyfive men in town and led the rest in the direction the guerrillas had
fled.

They’d been back at the Singleton farm less than three hours when
scouts brought warning of Yankees coming from Centralia—125
men armed with muzzleloaders and riding plug horses. Even those
who’d been sleeping off the whiskey and labors of the morning leapt
up at the call to arms despite their throbbing heads and were pistoled
and horsed in minutes. Dave Pool was furious in his whiskey haze,
cursing the Yanks for giving him no rest. Bill too was still half-drunk,
his head howling with pain, as he and Todd quickly shaped a plan.

Arch Clement sat his horse and waited. The late afternoon light
aggravated the dull whiskey pain behind his eyes, and the crows in
the trees were carrying on with such a clatter he wanted to shoot
them all. He wished he had some whiskey left to take the edge off his
hangover. The six men of his party were all suffering in like manner
and their ill moods carried into their horses, the animals stamping
and snorting with malicious urge.

Now the Yankees appeared over a low hill and one of their front
men spied the guerrillas and pointed. A cry went up and their officer
drew his saber and waved it forward and the Yanks came on at a
lumbering gallop.

Arch and his party reined about and retreated—but had to hold
their mounts back to keep from putting too much distance between
themselves and the pursuing Unionists. Now another rise loomed
ahead and as the guerrillas disappeared over it the Yankees were a
quarter-mile behind.

When the Yanks achieved the crest, they reined up short at the
sight of two hundred guerrillas sitting their horses at the bottom of
the hill in wait for them.

Some trooper bellowed “Holy shit!” and might well have been
speaking for them all.

 

Major Johnson hesitated but briefly before ordering his men to
dismount, fix bayonets and form a battle line, the standard tactic of
the infantry manual. The horseholders—every fourth man—quickly
retreated with the mounts to the off side of the hill.

 

The bushwhackers gawked. “Am I
awake
?” George Todd asked
Bill Anderson. “Are those fools intending to fight us on foot?”

 

“
Now
we’ll even some hard scores,” Butch Berry said. The wild
roll of his off eye heightened his becrazed aspect. Bill thought he
could smell the boy’s hatred like a sulfurous vapor. His own head felt
afire and his blood roared in his ears.

 

Pistols drawn, they heeled their mounts into a lope, their battle
line moving forward in an even row—and then every man of them
raised a rebel yell to shiver the sky and kicked his horse into a gallop
and they charged up the hill.

 

“Readyyyy,”
Major Johnson commanded.
“Fire!”

 

Only three guerrillas were unhorsed by the fusillade, most of the
musketballs sailing over the line of horsemen for the downward
angle of fire. The Yanks had no chance to reload. The sole Federal
armed with a revolver, Johnson stood cool and steady in the haze of
riflesmoke and fired at the bushwhacker now at the fore of the thundering line and coming straight for him. He missed the guerrilla with
three consecutive shots and then the rider was on him and for an
instant he saw quite clearly the blue-eyed boy’s wildly grinning face
before Jesse James’ .44 pistol ball blew his brain apart.

The Centralians had thought they’d seen horror in the round when
the twenty-two Federals were executed, but this day’s second visitation of guerrillas—this time to make short work of the soldiers Johnson had left in town—made them understand just how little they
knew of such things. As they watched the bushwhackers taking ears
and lifting scalps, they realized how utterly ignorant they’d been
about the harsher truths of this war. And still they had not seen the
worst—and they would not, not with their own eyes. But they would
hear of it from the Federal troops who arrived the next day and went
out to the field to collect the great sprawl of their comrades out
beyond the low hills of the prairie where they served no army now
but the black ranks of the crows. The Yankees buried their dead in a
single long grave just outside of town without permitting any of the
townsmen to look on the corpses, but the locals later heard the soldiers’ saloon talk of decapitated comrades, of heads swapped from
one dead man to another in effort of some horrific joke, of heads
placed on the muzzles of upright muskets, sans ears and nose and
eyes and none unscalped, of heads set facing each other with wide
grins and holding pipes or cigars between their teeth. They heard of
faces beaten to pulp and bone shards, including that of Major Johnson, who had also been scalped and would never have been identified
except he had not been beheaded nor stripped of his uniform. They
heard of men impaled on their own bayonets. Of men with their severed sexual parts in their mouth.

The final tally would never be certain, but by the Yankee army’s
own estimate, 150 Union soldiers—including the furloughed troopers on the train—were killed by bushwhackers in and about Centralia in the course of that dread September day.

That night he takes out Josephine’s ribbon. He has not tied a knot in
it for many days. His careful count of the knots arrives at fifty-four.
He remembers the winter visit to Kansas City when he gave it to her,
recalls how she tied her hair with it and how the vision she presented
caught his breath.

Old Pap
You told them I’d make them sorry, and I have. But any more,
little darling, it’ll make me sorry too. I don’t guess you’d want that.
You know I’ll always love you.
He rolls the ribbon and puts it back
in his jacket and he will not take it out again.

They decided to split up again, the better to elude the Yankees. “See
you when I see you,” Todd said, and rode off with his men to southward. Bill took the Kansas First Guerrillas west into Howard
County.

They rode by night and made fireless camps in the deeper woods
during the day. He posted videttes in every direction and was kept
apprised of the massive hunting parties scouring the countryside in
search of them. They got sporadic word of Federal reprisals—the
burning of Rocheport, where the guerrillas had been so well received,
the promiscuous hangings of secessionist farmers, some of whom
had helped the bushwhackers, some of whom Bill had never known.
***

The news of Sterling Price was glum. Halfway to Saint Louis, he had
chosen to attack the Yankee garrison at Pilot Knob rather than simply skirt it. The decision was a major blunder. In a two-day battle he
lost 1,500 men. His army too weakened and demoralized to make
the planned assault on heavily defended Saint Louis, he turned
toward Jefferson City, the state capital. But his wagon train was slow
and his ranks ridden with men of poor discipline, and by the time he
reached Jeff City, it had been so greatly reinforced that to attack it
would have been further folly. So he made for Boonville, which he
could easily occupy, and sent word to all guerrilla bands that he
wished to rendezvous with them there.

Archie Clement had been riding as a forward scout and was waiting
for the company when it arrived at the Boonville Road. He sat his
horse beside an oak against whose trunk was seated a decapitated
German farmer with his hands holding his head in his lap. A stalk of
yellow grass hung from a corner of the farmer’s mouth and his
expression was almost wistful. Arch grinned and waggled his brows
at his passing comrades and cut leering glances at the dead man.
Some of the newer members of the company chuckled uncertainly at
the spectacle as they trotted past it, but such sights had by now lost
all novelty for the others and they scarce remarked it. Bill Anderson
looked on it and felt a profound sense of fatigue.

When the Kansas First Guerrillas reined up in front of the Boonville
hotel serving as Price’s headquarters, the men of the Army of Missouri regarded them mutely. Quantrill’s band had struck them as a
rough breed, but a day later they saw Todd’s bunch and were persuaded that guerrillas came no meaner. But even Todd’s company
had not prepared them for the sight of Bill Anderson’s bunch. The
general came out to shake Bill’s hand and say he was honored to
meet him, and Bill was impressed with the tall man’s bulk of more
than 250 pounds. But Price could not keep from gawking at the
wildhaired band before him, most of them still outfitted in filthy Federal blues and smelling of blood and smoke and graves laid open. He
regarded with dismay their necklaces of ears and fingers, the scalps
dangling from bridles and saddlehorns, from belts and boottops. He
had heard that these men took grisly trophies, but he had dismissed
such reports as Yankee mendacity or the routine exaggerations of the
press. Yet here the truth was, in all its raw stink.

Bill read Price’s face and turned to Jim and told him to see that
the horses were watered and fed. Jim caught his look and understood
and quickly got the company away from there in a clatter of hooves
and a raise of dust.