Wildwood Boys

by James Carlos Blake

  In the family library too was Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language and Bill loved to pore over it in search of recondite words with which to affect airy learning. “You are an olfactory offender,” he would accuse his brother—and laugh while Jim angrily riffled through the dictionary and his mother smiled over the cookpot. “Looks like precipitation might be erumpent today,” he would say as he leaned on his ax and studied the clouded sky and his father would glower and tell him to talk plain goddammit or keep his lip buttoned.

  They were mad for music, this family Anderson, though Bill would never learn to play any instrument other than his father’s Jew’s harp and some few chords on the harmonica, which instrument his brother played with enviable ease from the time he was five years old. His father also a harmonicist and a fair hand with the fiddle, though his wife liked to joke that the best thing about his fiddling was that it kept the field rats from the house. She herself adept with the zither passed through generations of her family and which she taught her daughters to pluck as her mother had taught her in Kentucky. Saturday evenings the Anderson porch would sway with music born in Appalachian hollows, with melodies sailed over from Britain’s misty isles. The livelier numbers set them to turns of stepdancing on the porch planks, the plaintive tunes to harmonizing on ballads of lovers long gone, of honor defended and died for, of foggy rivers and wandering ghosts and deepwood mountain homes, of bloodfeuds and murder and the hangman’s rope.

  THE PARTNERS

  In their first eight years of rustling Will Anderson and his partners but thrice failed to get horses, each time caught in the act and each time holding to plan and abandoning the horses and splitting up in all directions and each man of them making his way back home on his own. Then came a night when they were driving a dozen ponies out of Clark County and were suddenly beset by pursuers. Sutpen the graybeard was shot from his mount and the attitude of his tumble was sufficient testament that he was dead. The escaped three later learned that he’d been stood in an open upright coffin in front of a Kahoka general store with a sign on his chest: “Do you know this man?” But none did identify him and after a few days the stink demanded interment. His surviving partners lifted a cup in his memory and continued to rustle, just the three.

  The following year a posse fell on them as they were driving a pilfered herd up from the riverbreaks of Saint Charles County. The partner named Harris had his mount shot screaming from under him and was captured. Will and Nordstrom, the other partner, got clear, but Will wondered aloud if Harris would hold to their common pledge never to give up the names of the others. Nordstrom said he had been friends with Harris most of his life and knew for a fact the man would hang before betraying a partner.

  Three days later in the early dawn one of Nordstrom’s neighbors who had often bought horses from him and Will came riding up to the Anderson house at a gallop. Will stepped out on the porch to receive the man’s breathless report that a party from Saint Charles County had showed up at Nordstrom’s farm in the night and dragged him from his bed and hanged him for a horse thief. Hanged him from a shade oak flanking the house, bootless and in his underwear. The vigilantes were cooking breakfast over open fires when the Marion County sheriff arrived to find Nordstrom still suspending crooknecked and frog-eyed in full view of his sobbing widow and two young children. When the Saint Charles men explained the matter to him, he said he couldn’t much fault them for hanging the man, then told them to take the body down and lay it out in the house.

  “Them boys’re looking for you too, Will,” the neighbor said. “Asked after Will Tyler by name. The sheriff said he’d bring them here just as soon as he had him some breakfast.”

  Bill Anderson was then eight years old and this his first inkling of his father’s true and perilous trade. He was deeply impressed by Will Anderson’s self-possession in the face of this news which he received as though it were not news at all. The neighbor’s face by contrast was antic with fear and the boy could sense danger closing fast. He felt himself grinning with a novel excitement he could not have described but did evermore want in his life.

  At midmorning the hanging party arrived to find the place deserted but for its livestock, and none of the abandoned beasts did say whither the man Tyler and his family had fled.

  THE VETERAN

  They settled in Randolph County, a mile west of Huntsville and hard by Black Owl Creek branching off the east fork of the Chariton. The countryside was thick with river willows and cedar brake, hardwood forest, glades with rich yellow grass as high as a horse’s belly. Bears rambled in these woods, wildcats prowled the shadows. The last of the local wolves raised distant wail in the night’s deep reaches. Herons stalked the creeks and owls hooted in the dark trees and swooped in hunt through the hollows. Here had Will Anderson’s two brothers, Jessup and Hayes, come to settle a few years ago after they’d finally had enough of their bullying father and struck out from Kentucky. And here Will found a tract of good bottomland bordering his brothers’ farm.

  His younger brother Hayes was gone away to the war in Mexico when Will and his family arrived in the heat of mid-summer. Hayes had taken a Boone County woman to wife in his first year in Missouri but before they’d been wed five months he was widowed by the cholera. His bereavement was such that when the war broke out in the spring of ’46 he gave a deaf ear to Jessup’s arguments against enlistment and went for a soldier. He rode to Texas to join up, rather than enlist with Bill Doniphan’s Missouri volunteers, for he wanted no comrades but strangers. He did not write even one letter in his absence, and now the war was nearly six months concluded and still no word had come from or about him. Whether he lived or lay dead in Mexico’s alien ground remained mystery.

  Jessup was delighted to have Will for a neighbor and helped him to construct a family cabin and a barn. The brothers often visited back and forth, and as they puffed their pipes and passed a jug between them in front of a fire built high against the icy winter evenings, they sometimes mused about heading west into the vast new territories taken from the Mexicans. At first they refused to believe the tales they heard on every trip to town about the gold strikes in California, the ready wealth to be reaped there. But still the stories came, and they began to ask each other if they weren’t fools not to go claim their own portion of riches. Martha sometimes heard them as she sat at her sewing or at writing a letter to her sister in Jackson County. Her lips would draw tight at their foolishness but she’d hold silent and tell herself it was just talk, that at least he wasn’t out doing something to set the law after them again.

  They had been living on the Black Owl more than a year and the autumn trees were turned yellow when Hayes came home. His empty right sleeve was folded and pinned to the shoulder of his threadbare dragoon’s tunic. His face was sickly hued and skeletal under a scraggly beard. His hair hung in tangles from under his hat. He nodded on being introduced to Martha and the children. Bill Anderson was enthralled by this uncle who had warred in a foreign land and whose eyes looked aged beyond his years by all the things they’d seen. Hayes kept a whiskey jug at hand as he sat on the porch with his brothers and he often sipped of it. Jessup gestured at the armless shoulder and said he guessed the mash helped some with the pain. Hayes shrugged and said, “I guess.”

  At supper he spoke only in response to direct address and said no more than necessary. He was indifferent to conversation and shrugged at most questions put to him. He did not care to say where he had been for the year and a half since the end of the war or how he had lost his arm nor anything at all about his time in Mexico. He was unaffected by his brothers’ jokes and efforts to make him smile. In days to follow he was content to keep to himself and the comfort of his jug. Jessup and Will soon tired of trying to animate his spirits and thereafter let him alone.

  Only in the company of young Bill and little Jim was Hayes inclined to talk. The boys would go to his house and ask if he cared to go fishing with them and he always did. They were usually accompani
ed by several dogs and Hayes was much amused by Bill’s supposed ability to converse with them. A yellow curdog named Quick once sat and stared at Hayes intently and then turned to Bill and wuffed low and the boy looked into its eyes for a moment before making a gesture of dismissal and the dog trotted over to a shady spot under a tree and settled itself with its muzzle on its paws.

  “That yeller say something about me?” Hayes said, his expression both suspicious and amused.

  “Well, sir,” Bill said, “he believes you’re about the saddest man he ever saw.”

  “Is that right?” Hayes said. He looked over at the dog and it cut its eyes away without moving its head. “Well, truth be told, that son of a bitch don’t look so all-fired jubilant to me neither.”

  The boys laughed with him and the yellow dog raised its head and itself appeared to smile.

  He never spoke of his lost bride but talked mostly of the war, of having seen the elephant, as the expression of the day had it. While they sat on the creekbank and watched the stick floats bobbing on their lines he told of the battle of Monterrey, of the boom and blast of artillery and of house-to-house fighting and men shot and bayoneted and blown to portions. Told of screams and smells that might have issued from hell’s own butcher shop, of blood running in the cobbled streets. Three days the battle endured, and when it was done he was one of the fortunates yet intact and without serious wound. That night he and some of his fellows celebrated in a cantina. In his joy at being alive he whooped and discharged a pistol into the ceiling and the ball ricocheted off the iron brace of a viga and angled down to strike the arm he rested on the dusky shoulders of a señorita and shatter its humerus like a thing of glass. The surgeon had been obliged to amputate at the shoulder. He said the missing limb sometimes itched him so bad he thought he might go insane for not being able to scratch it. He still couldn’t stand the thought of his arm rotting in Mexican ground, and he regretted not bringing it back to bury in America.

  One day Hayes revealed to the boys a Colt revolver he’d stolen from an ordnance wagon for no reason but conviction that the army owed him something for his disfigurement. A huge thing more than fifteen inches long and weighing close to five pounds fully charged with .44-caliber conical balls, it was hardly less than a hand cannon.

  “A Texas Ranger named Walker helped Colonel Colt to design it,” Hayes told the boys. “It’ll blow the most of a man’s head off. If you run out of rounds, why, you can bust a skull with it sure as a hammer.”

  He handed the piece to Bill. “I can’t work that loading lever with just one arm,” Hayes said. “You might as well have it.” Bill cradled it in both hands and marveled as if upon some holy object.

  YEARS OF THE ARGONAUT

  Another winter passed and now nothing would do for Jessup and Will but to go to California and claim their share of gold. Martha argued vehemently against the enterprise. She had made wide allowance for Will’s inclination to horse theft but this ambition was too reckless for her to accept without protest. Just because every fool and fool-killer in the country was going to California was no reason for them to join the parade. She asked what they knew about prospecting, asked Will how she was supposed to manage the farm without him as well as care for two-year-old Josephine and newborn Jenny. Will let her talk herself tired and then said Hayes would stay on the place with her and pointed out that Bill was almost of a size to do a man’s work and six-year-old Jim was already tending to various main chores. She couldn’t believe he was leaving her to care for a farm and five children and one of them an infant and another not much more and nobody to help her but a one-armed and half-distracted man devoted to the jug. But she could see that her husband was decided, and so at last she only sighed and said no more about it. Three weeks later Will and Jessup struck out for the Santa Fe Trail and four years would pass without a word from either.

  Hayes proved surprisingly adept at working a variety of tools with his single hand, and though he sipped from his jug all through the day he seemed never to be drunk. Young Bill demonstrated his sufficiency to grown man’s work of every kind and Jim and Mary worked hard as well and their mother never rested and the farm fared better than any would have guessed. The cornfield throve and the pigs fattened properly. In season they harvested the corn and shocked the stalks, put up yams and turnips and potatoes in the root cellar, butchered hogs and smoked the meat. Evenings after supper the family came together on the porch for music and song. Uncle Hayes delighted them all with his nimble stepdancing to the strains of Jim’s harmonica and Bill’s Jew’s harp and Mary’s able thumping on a washtub bottom.

  Sometimes of a late afternoon Bill took the big Walker to the creek to practice. When he shot a bird or squirrel the creature simply vanished and nothing remained but scattered feathers or bits of bloody pelt. He taught his little brother to shoot the Walker too, though it was all young Jim could do to aim the piece with both hands, and the recoil each time flung the gun high over his head and usually threw him down. Their uncle regarded their shooting with approval and took pulls from his jug and now and then told them another story of the war. He told of men dying in greater numbers of fever than by enemy hand, of men so sick with the “blues” they did shit themselves to death. The whole time he was in Mexico there was no escaping the stink of human shit. He told of Mexican coronets playing the no-quarter tune called “Degüello” all through the night before the fight at Monterrey. Men stopped their ears with plugs of tobacco to keep from hearing it another minute. “You never heard nothing like that cutthroat music,” he said. “Freeze the hair in your ass.”

  Three years passed and half of a fourth. One cool autumn Sunday Uncle Hayes went to the Black Owl by himself to sit under the drooping willows and drink from his jug and skip stones across the water. When they found him four hours later he was facedown on the bottom of the creek in a depth of barely three feet. Young eels swam through his early grayed hair wavering in the current. The jagged bone jutting from below his elbow told the story: he’d fallen in and broken the arm and been unable to push himself up to breathe. Bill dug his grave in the shade of a cottonwood and Jim and Mary fashioned a cross from two barked pieces of wood and his mother read over the gravemound from the Psalms.

  There came an early thaw that spring and the days warmed fast. On a brightly blue May morning Jim Anderson saw a man mounted on a sagging horse plodding across the meadow toward the house and even before the rider drew close enough to make out his face he thought he knew who it was. Now the dogs came aware of the stranger and rose up out of the new grass in a clamoring rush and Jim called them to come back but they ran on until Bill came out and whistled them down. The pack came loping back with tongues lolling and they sat before him and Bill told them with his eyes not to bark at that man ever. They cocked their heads and he said, “It’s Daddy is why.” The dogs resettled on the grass and watched the man come on and none did yap at him again.

  Bill called into the house and a moment later the family was gathered on the porch and staring out at the approaching rider. A low breeze was at his back and they caught his smell while he was yet at a distance. He dismounted at the porch steps and the ruined horse that was naught but hide and bone blew tremulously and Will Anderson looked up at them all in turn with eyes blackly hollowed by every sort of exhaustion. His clothes were torn and caked with dirt and his own accumulated exudates, his boots held together with wire, his hat absent its rear segment of brim.

  Martha Anderson went down the steps and took him in her arms. He hugged each of his children in turn and Bill saw that the others’ eyes too went tearful with the reek of him. They did not know that this hard smell was not entirely of the filth of his rags and unwashed flesh but was also the very smell of rage, of festering anger, a scent Bill and Jim Anderson would come to know well in men other than their father in the years ahead.

  “Jessup’s dead” were his first words. His voice raspy and unfamiliar. “Took sick on the Mokelumne placers two winters ago and died in a fever.
”

  He scanned the area and Bill knew who he was looking for. “We anyway never got us one bit of gold except for what we took from a Chinaman’s teeth one time when he was drunk and Jessup lost that at dicing the same night.” He turned to his wife and said, “If I ever had a worse idea than going to California I can’t remember what it was. Where’s Hayes?” And learned then that his only other brother in the world was in his grave.

  He spoke no more of California. He’d told the truth about not acquiring even a speck of gold but for the Chinaman’s teeth, but he never told of the bandits who fell on him and his brother in their camp in their second year of working the placers. They shot Jessup dead and would have killed Will too if he hadn’t jumped in the river and been carried downstream to safety, although he barely escaped drowning and then nearly died anyway of the ague he contracted from the icy water. He did not tell of the long months of sickness and then being penniless in San Francisco and turning in desperation to the robber’s trade and being as often beaten and robbed himself as he did beat and rob others. He joined with a pair of partners and thought he’d struck it rich the night they robbed the counting room of a gambling hall and got away with thousands of dollars. But when they reined up at the outskirt of town to apportion the loot, one of the partners shot the other dead off his horse and tried to shoot Will too but only killed his mount from under him before making away with all the money. Back at thieving and robbing on his own, he was captured one night by a party of city vigilantes. He would have been hanged but for a ship company’s need of work crews to put its vessels right for voyages round the Horn. The company was hard pressed to find willing workers in that city of goldseekers and businessmen and grifters and thieves, but the owner had influence with the vigilante committee and they would sometimes provide him with criminal labor for a fee. And so Will was bound over to the ship company to serve a sentence of eighteen months, and in that time he toted and caulked and hammered and sawed and sanded and painted while others in California sought for gold or robbed it from those who’d found it. These things he never told.