The lean man pushed an empty chair out from the table with his foot. “Sit,” he said. “We got a proposition for the Anderson boys. You and your brother too. Hear it out careful and then take it to them.”
By sundown he was back at the camp. As soon as they saw his face the Anderson brothers knew the tiding was bad.
The news of their father’s death stunned them all the more for Arthur Baker being the instrument of it. That clumsyfoot fop of a storekeeper.
“Sheriff Horner’s calling it self-defense plain and simple,” Butch Berry said.
Bill Anderson poked at the fire with a stick, his face a wavering red mask in the firelight, his brother Jim’s the same.
“I guess I know what you boys are thinking,” Ike Berry said. “It’s only natural. For a fact, me and Butch didn’t let them sonofabitches slide who cut up our daddy. But this is different. They got your sisters there. They got your daddy who needs burying.”
Jim Anderson spat into the fire.
“Ike’s telling you right,” Butch Berry said. His wayward eye seemed more pronounced in the firelight.
The Andersons exchanged a look in which each recognized in the other’s eyes how much the world was changed by the fact of their father’s removal from it. And in that look they pledged to set the matter right in its proper time.
They sent Butch back that evening with acceptance of Segur’s offer—backed by Sheriff Horner’s assurance—of their safe passage to come home and bury their father and then go away to Missouri with their sisters and whatever belongings they cared to take with them. The rustling warrants on them would be put aside. In exchange, the Andersons agreed never to return to Kansas. As the Berry boys were now known members of the rustling party, they too had to swear they would keep out of Kansas henceforth.
Butch was on the porch the next morning with the Anderson girls, the sheriff and Segur when Bill and Jim appeared out of the woods and rode up to the house. Arthur Baker was in the barn with several of his armed men about him and would not show his face throughout the proceedings.
The Anderson family’s two wagons—one covered and one not—stood before the house, each already hitched to its brace of mules and bearing what possessions the sisters had selected to keep, and so the remaining business did not take long. There was little talk beyond the girls’ weepy greetings as they embraced their brothers. Bill informed the sheriff that he would not dishonor his father by burying him in Kansas but would take the body back to Missouri.
The sheriff squinted at this news and took a quick look back into the house where the body yet lay on the planking. “It’s a long ways to Missouri and he’s already dead two days.”
Bill Anderson looked at him without expression. The sheriff shrugged. “Hell, he’s your father.”
The Anderson brothers rolled the body in a blanket and tightly tied off the ends of the shroud and carried the corpse to the wagon in which Josephine sat and they laid it on the open bed. Josie leaned down to whisper in Bill’s ear, then Bill looked at Segur on the porch and said, “I’ll have that pistol you spirited out of the house.”
Segur stood with his thumbs hooked in his belt and regarded Bill without expression. Sheriff Horner cleared his throat loudly and spat off the porch. Segur glanced at him, then shrugged and stepped down and went to his horse. He probed in the wallet behind the cantle and withdrew the big Walker and handed it to Bill who passed it up to Josephine. She checked to see that all the chambers were charged and then held the piece in both hands with the muzzle sky-ward and looked to the barn and said, “Sheriff, why don’t you call that Baker fella to step up to the door there a minute?”
The sheriff’s mouth and Segur’s too came ajar. She showed Bill a quick grin and then laid the pistol beside her. He chuckled and got into the wagon and took up the reins and slapped them over the mules’ haunches and the wagon lurched into motion with loud creakings and clatter. Jim brought the covered wagon up behind, Mary and Jenny seated beside him, and the Berry boys followed on their mounts and with the Anderson horses on lead ropes.
“Where’s the dogs?” Bill said low to Josephine.
“Raven got hold of one of them sonofabitches by the leg and wouldn’t let go till they shot him,” Josephine said. “They shot Mariner too. I guess they shot them all.”
The Segur men watched them go by. In the first moments the only sounds were the rattlings of the wagons and the falling of hooves. Then someone hollered, “And stay gone, you goddamn pukes!”
Much guffawing and epithets and curses, a chorus of derision raining on the Anderson party as their wagons headed for the woodland trace. The brothers Anderson and Berry bit hard on their fury and kept their eyes ahead, refusing to give any show of insult or even of hearing. Mary and Jenny sat close together and admonished each other to be brave.
Only Josephine would not endure their taunts. She turned around on the wagonseat and yelled, “Everybody knows there’s three kinds of suns in Kansas—sunshine, sunflowers and sons of bitches—and none of you look like a sunbeam or a blossom to me!”
A few of the men laughed at her spunk, but most were enraged by the profane mouth on this slip of a girl and they came back at her with a torrent of the rawest cursing. One man flung a stone and it came near its mark, whacking on the inner side of a wagonboard and ricocheting against the shrouded body of Will Anderson. Josie clambered into the bed and grabbed up the rock and flung it back with fine form, scattering the bunch of them like spooked birds.
“Jesus! Little bitch can throw!”
Some of them started hustling after more stones, but from the porch Sheriff Horner hollered, “No rockfighting, goddammit!” The men said “Ah sheriff” and grudgingly lobbed their rocks aside.
As the wagon turned onto the trace, Josephine stood swaying in the jolting bed and bellowed, “Shitheads! Kansas shit-heaaads!”
Then their wagon was around the bend and behind the trees and Bill said, “All right, girl—hush up and sit down before you fall and bust your ass. I guess you told them.”
She settled back onto the seat and snuggled against him and held his arm tightly with both of hers. “I know you just want to be sure me and Mary and Jenny are safe someplace before you and Jimmy come back here and kill that Baker son of a bitch,” she said, this Josephine Anderson who was fourteen years old.
“Listen to you—such a young girl talking about killing.”
“I can’t help it I’m a girl, and killing is just exactly what he’s got coming. And I’m not that young.”
He looked at her sidewise and smiled.
“We’re not done with Baker, are we, Billy?”
“We? Well, we gave our word not to come back to Kansas.”
“Don’t shine me, Billy Anderson. I know as good as you a man’s word only holds when he gives it to a man worth having it.”
He chuckled. “That’s what Daddy always said. I didn’t know you ever listened to him.”
She glanced back at the body in the wagonbed and said softly, “I listened sometimes.” Then smiled at Bill again.
“I don’t know how come you keep grinning like there’s something to be glad about,” he said. “We got a shotdead daddy here and we’ve been run out of our home.”
“Kansas ain’t home,” she said, “and getting run out of it is no punishment as far as I’m concerned. It’s got too many Kansans in it is the trouble.”
“You’ve spent more of your life in Kansas than you ever have in Missouri,” he said.
“So what? It’s not how long you been someplace that makes it home. You think the people been in hell a thousand years would feel like they were leaving home if they got out tomorrow?”
He laughed. She hugged his arm and kissed him several quick times on the side of his face. “Oh Billy, I was so scared for you. I thought maybe they got you.”
“Hey girl,” he said, turning to look back at Jim and his sisters in the other wagon some dozen yards behind and the Berrys riding side by side a little behind Jim.<
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Josephine glanced back at the others too, then fixed Bill with a look and said mockingly, “Oh Bill, I’m just so ashamed for kissing my brother.”
He had to grin.
She kissed him on his ear and his cheek and the corner of his mouth. Then hugged herself to him with her head on his shoulder and hummed softly as the wagon jounced on.
ON THE LONE PRAIRIE
By their second day on the winding trace the stink was risen and it worsened swiftly in the swelter of this prairie summer. Two days later it was grown so foul they wore bandannas over their noses like a theatrical troupe playing at bandits but the measure was of little effect. The wagonbed was enclouded in a blackgreen storm of flies. The Berry boys daily rode farther behind and to north or south of the trace, depending on which way the wind was carrying. The Anderson girls pleaded with their brothers to bury the corpse anywhere along this remote landscape and be done with it.
“I told those Kansans I’d bury him in Missouri and I mean to do it,” Bill Anderson said.
To lessen the chance of encountering jayhawkers—who more and more were said to be robbing and murdering not only secessionists but even Unionists who could not solidly prove their loyalties—they were keeping off the Santa Fe Trail and making their way by an old stock trail a few miles to the north. This route was safer than the main road but also rougher and thus slower going, and the plodding pace prolonged their ordeal with Will Anderson’s rotting remains.
Came a noonday when they encamped for dinner and none could eat for the gut-twisting stench.
“It’s only a few days more to the border,” Bill said. But his tone lacked its earlier timbre of sworn purpose.
“Oh hell, Bill,” Jim Anderson said, slinging away his untouched beans and refitting the bandanna on his face, “I guess we made our point by not burying him back there. That’s what counts.”
“They’ll never know if we don’t get him all the way to Missouri,” Ike Berry said.
“Jesus, Billy,” Josephine said, “if I have to breathe this stink another day I believe I’m going to start throwing up forever.”
“Billy…” Mary began, and Bill Anderson threw up his hands and said, “All right then, all right! Get the damn spades.”
The men shed their shirts and worked in pairs under the hard sun, taking turns at digging a deep grave a few yards off this isolate trail. There were no other witnesses to the proceeding in this vast emptiness but the swirling flies and a dozen watchful crows lured by the aromatic deliquescence staining through the blanket. When the grave was ready, they lifted the body out of the wagonbed and lowered it into the hole and hurriedly covered it over. They crafted a cross of broken scantlings and cord and planted it firmly at the gravehead, and then Mary read from Ecclesiastes:
“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance….”
“Well,” Jim Anderson said when she was done, “I’d say he pretty much knew most of those times.”
“He sure knew the time for dancing,” young Jenny said.
“He was good about the times for laughing too,” Ike Berry said.
“It didn’t say anything in there about a time for getting drunk and a time for cussing, did it, Mary?” Bill said. They all laughed.
“He knew about a time to kill,” Josephine said seriously. “Remember how he did to that sorry muleskinner who tried to grab up under Mary’s dress?”
“Lord Jesus,” Butch Berry said, “I always did love that story. That’s something I would of paid to see three or four times.”
“You only had to see it once to not forget it,” Jim Anderson said.
Where the corpse had lain on the wagonbed it left umber stains bearing remnant stench. Though the girls would scrub the boards with brushes and lye they would never fully remove imprint or odor. For a long time after, people who walked by this wagon would catch a low scent from they knew not where and would have a sudden intimation of the grave.
They moved on. Fierce flaring sun on limp yellow grass. A fine dust-haze under a sparsely clouded sky of palest blue. They were most of a day crossing a range overgrown with young sunflowers risen to the wheel hubs like a bright yellow tide. Then they were once again on green shortgrass prairie but now the country assumed a gentle roll and was marked by brushy rises and a scattering of hardwood groves. The following day an unbroken line of woodland hills rose into view on the forward horizon like a shadowed landfall surfaced from a jade sea.
“Missouuuri, Missouuuri, bright lannnnd of the west,” Josephine sang happily.
They were yet a half-day from the state line when a low cloud of dust appeared in the distance on the Santa Fe road. The cloud was moving west—and then seemed to hold in place, and then began to swell. Butch Berry chucked his horse up beside Bill’s wagon and said, “Whoever they are, they’re coming.”
The Andersons reined up the wagon teams and watched the riders come. Ike held close to Jim’s wagon. Every man of them had a pair of charged revolvers hidden under his coat and Josephine had the Walker ready on the seat beside her and under a fold of her skirt. The only weapons in evidence were the knives in the men’s boots and two Sharps carbines, one propped beside Bill against the wagonseat, one lying across Mary Anderson’s lap. In the covered wagon lay Will Anderson’s old doublebarreled shotgun.
The approaching riders shaped into dark figures against the risen glaring dust—then into view came a Union banner batting at the fore of a column of two dozen cavalrymen.
The column reined up alongside the trail and their following dust came billowing over them and hazed the air yellow. A lieutenant heeled his horse up to Bill’s wagon and said, “Scouts spotted you.” He said it like an accusation. He sported a bare wisp of blond mustache and could not have been more than twenty years old.
He eyed the men thinly. Then took in the girls and smiled and said, “Ladies,” and tipped his hat. Mary and Jenny showed him their best smiles. Behind his back the men at the front of the column leered and pointed and blew kisses at the girls. Josephine started to make a rude gesture but Bill caught her hand and gave her a look. She made a face at him, then folded her hands in her lap and stared out at the prairie.
The lieutenant asked who they were.
“Loyal Union Kentuckians bound for home,” Bill said. “Three years was all of this damn Kansas we could stand. If it’s not a windstorm pulling your house apart and carrying off your corn into the next county, it’s outlaws stealing your stock or Indians sneaking up from the Nations to steal whatever you ain’t nailed down or locked up. It’s not a thing to look at out here but sky and grass till you think you’ll go crazy for the sight of a hill. No sir, you can have all this empty Kansas and ye welcome to it.”
“Give me the Ohio Valley every time,” the lieutenant said, almost smiling—and then his look again narrowed. “Union Kentucky, you say? How is it you men aren’t in uniform?”
“We aim to be,” Bill Anderson said, “just as soon as we get our sisters to our uncle’s farm. I got to say, Lieutenant, when we spied your dust we had a bad moment. We thought you might be bushwhackers. It’s why we’re keeping off the main road. We heard there was bushwhackers raiding all over yonder part of the Santa Fe road and we sure’s hell didn’t want to run into any. It’s a comfort to know you fellas are about.”
The lieutenant spat. “Bushwhackers! Those cowardly sons of—Excuse me, ladies. Those curdogs haven’t got the sand to set foot in Kansas. Not again.” His gaze shifted to the covered bed of the trailing wagon and he nodded at it and said, “I’ll just have a look.”
He hupped his horse to the rear of the wagon and leaned to peer within and satisfy himself that it held no munitions or other contraband.
He reached inside and took up the old shotgun and assayed it with an indulgent smirk and then put it back. Mary and Jenny looked at him through the front flaps of the wagoncover and he again smiled and nodded. Mary’s smile at him was radiant. Bill Anderson was impressed by how well she played her part.
The officer advised Bill that they’d be safer traveling on the Santa Fe than out here. “When you make the Leavenworth road you should take it to the fort and attach to the next army wagon train bound for Saint Louis. Be a lot safer for you traveling with the army than trying to get across that damn Missouri on your own.”
“I’ll take it as sound advice,” Bill said, “and I thank ye for it.”
The lieutenant again smiled at Mary and touched his hatbrim. “Ladies.”
He reined his mount around and circled his hand over his head and started back for the main road and the column came about to follow him. As the soldiers made their turn near the wagon, many of them called endearments to the girls through the rising mist of yellow dust.
“You blue-assed monkeys!” Josephine shouted into the rumble of hooves.
“Josephine!” Bill said.
She turned to say that’s exactly what those Yankees were and saw that he was grinning at her. So was Butch Berry.
“Josie, I swear your mouth is going to get you hanged one day,” Mary called from the other wagon.
“Get us all hanged,” Jim Anderson said.
Josephine affected to yank up on a noose around her neck and crossed her eyes and bulged out her tongue and despite themselves they all had to laugh.
NIGHTCAMP CAPERS
They moved on, keeping to trails off the main road. They didn’t know where they crossed into Missouri but by early afternoon they knew they were there. The country was as lovely as the Anderson brothers and Berry boys remembered it but it was also different in that two of the four farms they passed in sight of during the day seemed clearly to be abandoned—both of them with fences shambled, their cornfields trampled and going to ruin, one house bearing a blackened roof and wall and the barn half-burned as well. At one of the two places that showed smoke at their kitchen chimneys a trio of men with faces deepshadowed under their wide hatbrims and each with a rifle in hand had stood out in front of the house and watched them go by and none of the three lifted a hand or in any way made recognition of the greeting Butch Berry shouted in hope of being asked to stop and take dinner. At the other inhabited farm, no one came out to the porch or even showed himself at the door in response to Jim’s halloo. Only a pair of stave-ribbed horses and a tattered mule in the corral showed curiosity at their passing. The eerie silence was broken solely by the rattle and creak of the Anderson wagon and the snortings of the animals.
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