Wildwood Boys

by James Carlos Blake

“Well, I didn’t hear the story from you, so it’s not like I’m questioning anything you said to me.”

  Quantrill regarded him closely. “That’s almost an admirable argument. Perhaps your true calling is in the law. The legal profession thrives on such nimble turns of reason.”

  “If you mean some men are good at dressing up a lie to look like the truth, I agree with you there,” Bill said.

  Every man in the company had heard the story of Quantrill’s brother from somebody other than Quantrill. Only a few, Cole Younger among them, claimed also to have heard it from the man himself. Butch Berry had asked Younger if he thought it was a true story, and Cole laughed and said, “Sure it is—even if it ain’t.” The answer had not puzzled Bill as much as it did Butch.

  “It works the other way too,” Quantrill said. “Sometimes a lie only looks like a lie. Sometimes it’s, well, ‘the truth in masquerade.’ A poet named Byron said that.”

  “I know he did,” Bill said. “But when it comes to sayings about the truth, I always liked ‘tell the truth and shame the devil.’”

  “The glorious Bard!” Quantrill said, suddenly beaming. “Wise about truth and all else under the sun. I am impressed, William T. I hadn’t taken you for a littérateur. My favorite saw about the truth is that it shall make us free.”

  “Good old Bible,” Bill said. “It’s just full of notions about truth, ain’t it?” He raised his arms and intoned portentously: “‘Great—great—is the truth…’”

  “‘…and mighty above all things,’” Quantrill concluded.

  They grinned at each other.

  “Do you believe it?” Quantrill said. “That the truth will set you free?”

  “The truth perhaps will set you free,” Bill said, “but I’d prefer the jailhouse key.” He and his brother had fashioned the couplet in their boyhood—and then had to dodge swipes of their mother’s broom as she bewailed their shameful irreverence.

  “My preference as well,” Quantrill said. “Tell me, William, what’s the T for?”

  “The T? Why, Truth, of course—T for Truth.”

  Quantrill laughed. “Now I have to wonder if that’s the truth.”

  “Sure it is,” Bill said. “Even if it’s not.”

  They heard halloos from the direction of the house, the happy voices of young women, the rougher ones of men.

  “The ladies,” Quantrill said. “Returned from their urban adventure.” They went to the stable door and saw the wagons parked alongside the house, the girls being helped to step down. Bushwhackers were unloading the contraband cargo and carrying it to the cellar. “Let us make our salutations,” Quantrill said.

  “Salutations indeed,” Bill said. And they laughed.

  As they headed for the house, Bill determined that it did not matter a damn whether the story of Quantrill’s brother was true or false. The man was the elected leader of the most feared band of hardcases in Missouri, a chieftain to men who could not be fooled about courage or conviction, men to whom he’d proved his boldness—and his loyalty—beyond question. In the earlier afternoon, he had heard story after story of Quantrill’s coolness under fire, of hairsbreadth escapes effected by his quick thinking and readiness to risk his own skin, of his refusal to desert a wounded comrade. His men said of him that he did not know how to be afraid. Against these testaments of what he was, what matter anything he’d been?

  He’d been born in Ohio and not in Maryland as he’d claimed after he went west, and he’d had no older brother ever. He’d been a pensive and solitary boy who from his earliest years hated those who would dictate to others and especially to him. He’d been an avid student of many subjects and his favorites were Latin and literature. He’d been a teacher in various places from the age of sixteen and was by all accounts a good one. He’d been a farmer and a rancher and detested both vocations. He’d been a drifter for a time and gone west at age nineteen and settled for a time in Kansas. He’d been a laborer and worked at unloading timber from freight cars. He’d been accused of murdering a freightyard worker but claimed self-defense and was exonerated. Under the name of Charley Hart—a name he’d taken for reasons known to no one but himself—he’d been a teamster for the U.S. Army and gone on a military expedition to Utah. He’d been a gambler and a fancy dresser partial to white linen suits and a planters hat and diamondback boots, but he’d had a tendency to push his luck and he lost as often and as spectacularly as he won. He’d been a gold prospector in Colorado and was beset by Indians and a brutal winter and of the nineteen men in the party only five survived, and the gold he brought back to Kansas fetched him thirty-five dollars. He’d been close to his mother and in his early years out west wrote frequent letters to her and told her he’d been spared in Colorado because he was destined for greater things, and then his letters ceased and she never heard from him again. He’d been a resident among the Delaware Indians. As Bill Clark in Lawrence, Kansas, he’d been locked a month in jail for dealing in stolen goods—convicted more on suspicion of being Missourian than on any criminal evidence—and had been warned on his release never to return to that town if he knew what was good for him. He’d for a brief time been an admirer of Jim Lane and then saw him as an evil charlatan and came to hate him above all men on earth. He’d been a bandit and again called himself Charley Hart. He’d been a thief of small goods, a rustler of cattle and horses, a catcher of runaway slaves. He’d been in a gang of Missouri ruffians and soon gained its leadership and the band had grown to his present company of notorious raiders. He’d always been adept with the ladies and had known many women but had never been married or even in love until a few months ago when he’d met a Blue Springs girl ten years his junior named Katherine King.

  These things and others he’d been and some he still was. And in this summer of 1862 he was just turned twenty-five years old.

  A TIME TO BE JOYOUS AND A TIME TO MOURN

  Except for a detail of four guards posted about the property, the only ones not at the supper table that evening were Tyler Burdette, who lay upstairs stewing in the rank sweat of his agony, and Mary Anderson, who sat at his lamplit bedside and mopped his face and held his burning hand and whispered endearments which under better circumstance she would have blushed to give voice to.

  Everyone else was in the dining hall, seated at the long table of polished oak on which were platters of roast pork, large bowls of biscuits, of boiled greens and potatoes and blackeyed peas, smaller ones of different gravies, a dozen tin plates of pies—cherry and rhubarb and apple. There were jugs of cool water and steaming pots of coffee. The Vaughns would permit Quantrill to sit nowhere but at the head of the table and he beamed on the assembly like a well-pleased manor lord.

  The room was boisterous with sundry conversations and the telling of various tales all at once, with joking and laughter. Jenny Anderson was the bushwhackers’ twelve-year-old darling. Some of them had been bandaged by her at the Parchman farm and all of them were as protective of her as their own little sister. She herself had a special fondness for a burly blackbeard named Socrates Johnson, who at age thirty was the second oldest man in the company. He was called Sock by his fellows but she always addressed him as Socrates, and he hailed her as “Lightfoot,” in reference to her quick and boundless energy.

  The Vaughn sisters sat to either side of their brother and doted on him, petting him and brushing his hair with their fingers, spooning his plate high with huge helpings of everything, elated to have him home and unharmed. Josephine had ensured that Bill sat beside her, and when she saw him watching the way Annette and Hazel were fawning over Jimmy, she nudged him with an elbow and gave him an arched-brow look that said “You see?” Bill smiled and winked at her and she stroked his leg under the table. He whispered for her to behave herself. She showed a sweet smile and pinched him.

  Butch Berry had seated himself on Josephine’s other side, but he might as well not have been at the table, so utterly did she ignore him. She sometimes looked away from Bill to enjoy somebody�
�s joke or listen to a cross-table exchange, but never to look at Butch. He could not bring himself to speak to her. He was afraid she would fix him with one of her stares, like she didn’t quite recognize him and didn’t really care to. Or worse, make one of her faces of open vexation. Or worse still, make some loud remark to embarrass him before the room. So conscious of her nearness, he could give mind to nothing else—could only feign interest in the surrounding conversations, could only pretend to know what the joke was when he joined in the table’s sudden swells of laughter. He thought he could feel the heat of her skin on his face.

  When the meal was done the party repaired to the salon. Whiskey jugs came uncorked and the furniture was shoved back to the walls. A bushwhacker named Lionel Ward borrowed Hazel Vaughn’s fiddle and Jim Anderson took out his mouth organ. A Jew’s harp was produced, and a hornpipe. Jimmy Vaughn said it was a shame none among them could play the harpsichord in the corner of the room and never mind that it wasn’t an instrument for whirla-round dancing.

  They cavorted into the late hours, stamping the floorboards and swirling their tangled shadows over the high parlor walls, the men taking turns with the girls, the girls beaming with sweat and exhilaration in the light of so much lusty male attention. Upstairs, Mary Anderson held unconscious Tyler Burdette’s hand and said, “You hear the fun they’re having down there? The quicker you heal up, the quicker we can do some dancing too. Aren’t you the lucky one anyway, losing an arm instead of a leg? Nobody needs two arms to dance. Did I tell you I had an uncle with only one arm? Well, I did, and that man was just a dancing fool….”

  Quantrill proved a sprightly dancer, Cole Younger a jovial one who liked to sing along to the music as he trod the boards, W. J. Gregg a nimblefoot given to dancing by himself whenever he lacked a partner. Dave Pool’s blackbearded aspect was serious as a church-man’s even as his feet went mad to the liveliest numbers. Hazel Vaughn laughed at Ike Berry’s spirited clumsiness and then hugged him in apology and Ike’s breath was arrested in the sensation of her wonderful bosom against him. Except for young Jenny, who was a dervish no man could long keep pace with, Annette was their favored partner. She danced so well she made them all feel graceful as birds in their turn with her.

  Josephine persisted in having every other dance with Bill, but she was at last approached by a hesitant Butch Berry, who gestured timidly in invitation to a turn. She made a quick face of annoyance—then put her arms out and said, “Well don’t just stand there gawking, boy, if it’s dancing you want!”

  His grin felt the size of a keyboard and his heart was lodged in his throat the whole time he swung her around the floor. He reveled in the bright gaiety of her eyes, the heated girl-smell of her, the way the wet ends of her hair clung to her cheeks and neck. Then their dance was done and she scooted back to Bill. But Butch’s grin stayed with him, and his pulse thumped in his head like a victory drum.

  She was dozing in the bedside chair and still holding to Tyler’s hand when his grasp tightened and woke her. She put a palm to his sweaty brow, his hot cheek, asked if he’d like a drink of water. The bedroom window was gray with dawnlight. His cheeks shone with tears, his eyes were darkly hollowed but bright as embers under a sudden wind. He rasped: “I can’t even hug you proper.” She held his face between her hands and kissed his parched lips.

  When Josephine came into the room at sunrise with a tray of tea and porridge, Mary was kneeling by the bed and holding Tyler Burdette in her arms and rocking him as a mother comforting a child. The boy’s open eyes held no light at all. Josie put down the tray and went to the bed and gently drew Mary free of him, then folded his arm on his chest and closed his eyes. Mary hugged Josephine’s hips and wept softly against her belly. Josie stroked her sister’s hair and ached for the girl’s battered heart.

  They buried him in the woods at the rear of the property. Quantrill read from the Bible. Mary placed flowers at the gravehead and whispered words over them that none did hear save perhaps the stilled lover in the ground.

  BEFORE GOD AND THE DEVIL

  The morning after Burdette’s funeral, they were sitting around the breakfast table and leafing through newspapers when W. J. Gregg said, “Oh hell, Captain, you better read this.” He folded the paper so that the article was at the forefront and passed it to Quantrill.

  The report was more than a week old and pertained to Perry Hoy, who’d been among the first to join Quantrill and was one of his closest friends. He’d been captured by the Yankees in early spring and imprisoned in Fort Leavenworth. Because the Union had officially declared guerrillas to be outlaws, Perry Hoy’s participation in skirmishes in which Federal soldiers had been killed was regarded not as military duty but as complicity in murder. He’d been tried and convicted and sentenced to death. All the while, Quantrill had been trying to secure his freedom through an exchange of prisoners. Only two weeks ago, he had offered three captive Union officers in trade for Perry, but the Yanks had made no response. Until now.

  On a morning described as brightly sunny, on a well-tended parade ground at Fort Leavenworth, before a crowd of two hundred spectators said to be in festive spirit, Perry Hoy had been made to kneel before an army firing squad and was then shot dead.

  Quantrill put aside the newspaper and took a small notepad from his pocket and scribbled in it, tore off the sheet and folded it and handed it to Gregg. “Take this to Todd,” he said. “Tell him the company meets at the Red Creek camp tomorrow night. Go.”

  W. J. would later tell Bill Anderson the note said, “Shoot the three—now. Q.”

  Quantrill turned to Bill. “Have you ever made visit to Olathe, William T.?”

  “Once.”

  “Care much for the place?”

  He remembered the gunfight in Olathe barely two months ago. “Can’t say I did. Might’ve been pleasant except for some son of a bitch named Porter and a sheriff he owns like a dog.”

  “Well, I’ve been meaning to visit,” Quantrill said. “Redlegs have been brokering horses there, and I’ve got new boys in need of good mounts.”

  “It’s a prosperous town,” Cole Younger said. His grin was larcenous. “Got lots of everything.”

  Quantrill looked around at the others, then back at Bill. “You and your boys can ride with us if such is your ambition.”

  Your boys. Bill looked at his brother and at the Berrys and none seemed to have objection to Quantrill’s view of them as Bill Anderson’s boys.

  “Gregg and Todd have both put in for you,” Quantrill said. “Younger and Haller have spoken for you too.”

  Cole Younger grinned at Bill.

  “But mark me,” Quantrill said, raising a finger in the manner of a teacher emphasizing a point. “We have a law in this company, a law hard as stone. We don’t inform. An informer is a traitor of the worst stripe. We will kill an informer and every man in his family. If any of you cannot swear by that law, then you may take your leave and good luck to you.” He leaned forward. “Gentlemen, I’ll know your answer.”

  Bill looked at his brother. Jim said, “I’m for it.”

  He turned to the Berry boys. “Me and Butch already talked about it,” Ike said. “We’re with you, Bill—if you’re in, we’re in.” Butch Berry nodded.

  “Well then,” Quantrill said. He got to his feet and they all stood too. “Do you swear,” he said, “swear before God and the devil, before the power of heaven to grant eternal salvation and the power of hell to punish for time without end, do you swear to live by the law of this company unto death? If so, say, ‘I do so swear.’”

  And swear they all four did.

  THE LIST

  An hour after they departed the Vaughn place they arrived at a farm off the Mission Road. The sun was not yet ascended above the trees. Most of their party remained hidden in the bush as Jimmy Vaughn and Cole Younger sneaked around to the back of the house to guard against escape through a rear window. Socrates Johnson and Ike Berry rode up and hallooed the house, both of them with their pistols hidden un
der their partly buttoned dusters. Sock Johnson wore a collapsible stovepipe hat he carried in his saddle wallet for just such occasion as this. The door opened and from the inner darkness the man’s voice said, “Who are you? What you want?”

  “Name’s Reaper,” Sock Johnson said. “The Reverend Jedediah Reaper, of the Church of Holy Divine. Me and my boy have lost our way and we wonder if ye might help us to get our proper bearings.”

  The door opened just wide enough for a man to step out onto the porch. He held a lone-barrel shotgun of goodly bore, the hammer cocked, and stood warily, ready to shoot and leap back into the house at a hostile gesture. He looked all about, then kept his narrow gaze shifting between Johnson and Butch Berry. “A preacher, ye say?”

  “That is correct, sir,” Johnson said. “A poor but dedicated servant of the Lord. And your name, if I may inquire?”

  “Never mind my name. How do I know you’re who ye say?”

  “Well now, sir, I don’t fault you for your caution, what with the countryside crawling with brigands of every stripe in these sad days and so many of them traveling under false colors. How’s a man to know if the fella saying he’s a preacher really is one and not just some outlaw lying in the face of God? Believe me, sir, I take no offense at your suspicion. Such wariness is wisdom—and it is the very reason I carry proof of who I am. I have in my pocket a diploma of graduation from the Holy Divine Seminary. Permit me to show it to you.”

  Johnson’s hand went into the pocket of his duster and through the hole cut in it to give him easy access to the pistols on his belt. He cocked the revolver as he flicked aside the duster flap and the Colt blasted and the farmer flung back against the wall and his shotgun clattered to the porch planks. The man sat down hard with the look of someone recalling an important chore left undone.

  A scream sounded in the house and Ike Berry now brandished a pistol too. Johnson reined his horse half-about for a clearer view of the sitting man and then shot him again and the man’s head flung blood on the wall and he fell on his side. One foot waggled a few times and went still.