Bill studied the cap, and the look he turned on the farmer was not without disappointment.
“I won’t lie to you,” the man said. “I can see you’re bushwhackers—all them six-shooters, you all’s hair. Four days ago a troop of Yanks stopped here and made my wife feed them. They had a bad wounded man with them and they patched him up some in the barn. Must’ve left his hat. That’s the truth of it.”
“I’ll wager this is the son of a bitch who fed the man who shot Riley,” Arch Clement said. He was already at fashioning a proper thirteen-coil noose.
“When you helped a Yank, you chose your side,” Bill said. The verdict was rote and he had grown weary with imposing it.
Buster Parr came out of the house with a fiddle and a bow in his hand. He asked the farmer if he could play the instrument, and the man said he played passably.
Arch had the noose ready. “Enough palaver. Let’s raise him a little nearer to Jesus. Maybe that’ll restore his faith some.”
“You know ‘The Rose of Alabamy’?” Hi Guess asked the farmer. The man said he reckoned he did.
“It was Riley’s favorite song,” Hi said to Bill. “Be kinda nice to let this fella play it. I mean, we didn’t have a preacher to say words over Riley or nothing, why not play a song for him?”
The notion was appealing in its novelty, and Bill gestured for the man to play.
The minute the farmer drew the bow across the strings, most of the bushwhackers broke into grins. By the time he was midway through “Rose of Alabamy,” they knew they were in the presence of a master fiddler, and some of the men were singing along to the music:
So fare thee well, Eliza Jane,
and fare thee well, you belles of fame,
for all your charms are put to shame
by the Rose of Alabamy.
He played the tune for a good five minutes before at last stroking the final note and raising his chin off the fiddle, his face losing the shut-eyed smile it had held all through the number that had been his reprieve. But now somebody hollered “Do another!” and he hastened to it, tucking the instrument in place and stroking into a lively rendition of “Old Joe Clarke.” When he was done with that one, he didn’t wait to be asked but segued directly into “Cripple Creek,” and then “The Bully of the Town,” and then “The Johnson Boys.” He went through one number after another with hardly a break in notes between them for fear that even a moment’s respite from the music would snap the spell and the guerrillas would think to get back to the matter at hand. He played for his life, played each number with more fervor than the one before.
Some of the men were stepdancing and some doing dances of their own invention. Buster Parr shyly asked the man’s wife if she would take a turn with him and she glanced at her husband and then quickly accepted, though her smile was a stiff mask of desperation.
She spun around with one after another of the bushwhackers as her husband played on. He was careful not to repeat himself, as fearful of repetition as of hesitation between numbers, but more than an hour after he’d begun, he’d exhausted his repertoire of lively tunes, and he segued into a composition of slower pulse.
It was not a tune to dance to, and the guerrilla who held the man’s wife in readiness for the next turn now blushed and let go of her and backed away. This tune was so different from the music of the past hour that the bushwhackers only stood and stared. The wife read their unsmiling faces as a bad sign and could think of nothing to do but to sing the song he played:
I wonder as I wander under the sky
how poor baby Jesus was born for
to die for poor wretched sinners like you and like I.
I wonder as I wander out under the sky.
The man sensed the stillness around him and opened his eyes and saw their faces, but he played on, and they let him finish the number. Then he handed the instrument and bow to his wife and kissed her cheek and she began crying without sound.
“A fine valediction,” Bill said, and gestured to Arch Clement.
They left him hanging from a branch of the maple tree in his dooryard, the wife and children kneeling at his dangling feet and weeping their prayers to Jesus, whom the man had quit waiting for, but to whom he was now departed.
My darling wife—
The days blur one onto the other in their sameness. The evenings in camp sometimes seem to me as unreal as dreams, the men laughing and singing and telling jokes at the campfires, who only hours before were hard at killing. I confess to you that the pleas and the death cries of Federals and their informers, the wailings of their widows and children, are grown tiresome to me for their monotony. But such “music” remains, after all, the most popular tune of this war. O my sweet girl, I cannot but wonder sometimes at the uncertain nature of my thoughts….
Beloved husband—
My dreams of you are longer and more frequent than ever. I see you standing before me and smiling in your handsome wicked way and I run to your arms and we laugh and do the most wonderfully sinful things!—how I hate to wake from them! The tune I hear most often anymore is the sad refrain in my heart pining for your return….
REPRISALS AND A REVENANT
Into September and the bloodtide rises.
Ambushes and daily skirmish. Scalpings, dockings of ears and noses. The Federals decapitate two guerrillas on the bank of the Chariton and leave the heads on the dead men’s chests.
Two days after, Arch Clement flays a Union lieutenant’s face, then carefully arranges it on the ground, remarks that the fellow looks a little glum, and places an empty ammunition box over it to keep the crows off until the Yanks have their look. In the nosehole of the flensed skullface, he wedges a wild carrot.
They make the rounds of friendly havens through central Missouri, now taking a meal at this farm, now getting fresh horses at that one, now spending a night on a bed of hay at this other. They engage in several scattered skirmishes with random Federal units, inflicting many more casualties than they take. When they arrive at the familiar Rudd place in Carroll County, a hollow-eyed specter shambles out onto the porch to greet them, his skeletal frame hung with an overlarge Federal uniform and a quartet of revolvers.
“I thought you all would never get back,” he says in his thin strained voice. “I thought the war would be ancient history and I’d still be waiting on you.”
Frank James beholds his younger brother like something risen from the grave. Bill Anderson grins and says, “Sorry we took so long to come collect you, but we’ve been somewhat occupied.” Then laughs. “Damn boy, I don’t believe anything can kill you unless maybe it sneaks up from behind.”
QUANTRILL AND A DEBACLE
They joined now with Todd and Pool, and in their combined strength of two hundred men they struck at larger Federal patrols and encampments, inflicted greater casualties, and drew still larger numbers of Yankee troops into the pursuit of them—well serving Sterling Price’s strategy as his Army of Missouri began its move up from Arkansas and into eastern Missouri.
In Howard County they made a camp in the red cedars on Bonnefemme Creek a few miles south of Fayette and debated whether to try an assault on the Federal post in that town. They’d been told that the garrison had been reduced to a mere two dozen men, but the Yanks were well fortified in a log blockhouse atop a low rise. Todd was leaning toward the attack, but Bill thought the post might prove impregnable and cost them dearly. Todd took a party of men and went on a wide scouting mission to ensure there were no other Federals in proximity to come to the garrison’s aid.
The company was already at breakfast when Todd returned at dawn—and with him was William Clarke Quantrill and a band of two dozen men, all of them in Federal blue. Bill was in the company of his brother and Butch and Arch under an oak atop a low rise, feeding on hardtack and jerky. They watched the arrivals step down from the saddle and turn their mounts over to the horse pickets—except for vicious Charley, whom Quantrill tethered to a tree at a distance from the other horses. There was muc
h loud salutation between men who had not seen each other since late spring. Todd and Quantrill accepted cups of coffee at one of the fires and stood talking together. They both looked to Bill a bit stiff in their posture, and he thought that if they’d put aside their differences they had not put them aside very far.
Todd pointed in Bill’s direction and Quantrill came up the low rise and said hello to them all. He looked leaner than when Bill had last seen him, near to gaunt. The violet halfmoons under his eyes bespoke too many sleepless nights. Bill gestured for him to sit down. The others got up and moved off beyond earshot of them.
Quantrill settled himself crosslegged with a tired sigh and smiled wryly. “‘Christ, if my love were in my arms and I in my bed again.’ Don’t you agree, William T.?”
“I do,” Bill said. “But I also agree that if a frog had wings he wouldn’t bump his ass so much.”
“Ah, but you have a new name, don’t you?” Quantrill said. He raised his cup. “Here’s to Bloody Bill—the most feared man in Missouri.”
“Damn newspapers,” Bill said. “They’ve made me out so fearsome it’s a chore to keep from scaring myself.”
“Actually, there’s another Missourian even more fearsome than yourself,” Quantrill said. “Name’s Holcomb. Lives in Burton. Knows more about dealing pain than any man I ever met. Had me howling and begging for mercy, I tell you true. The very thought of ever meeting him again makes me all weak in the bladder.”
“That dentist I hear you went to?”
“He will instruct you in whole new notions of pain.”
“I’ve never been myself, but I witnessed Yeager in a dentist chair one time. Wasn’t pretty.”
Quantrill’s smile fell away at the mention of Yeager. “I heard about the unpretty things the Yanks did to Dick in Saline.”
“George squared things for him with the fellow who sold him out.”
“Is that so? Well, I’m sure Dick’s glad to know he’s all squared.”
His tone carried a note of mockery that reminded Bill of the last time they’d spoken—when Quantrill had advised against marriage to Bush—and the memory roused the resentments that attached to it. “What are you doing here?” Bill said.
Quantrill’s brow rose slightly at his tone. “Old Pap has called for bushwhackers to distract the Feds while he pushes for Saint Louis,” he said. “I thought we should get together and decide how we could use our companies to draw the most Fed troops away from the east and do Old Pap the most good. I took Kate to her daddy’s place in Blue Springs and I’ve been hunting you boys since. Finally ran into Todd last night.” He grinned. “We came this close to shooting each other for Yankees in our bluecoats.”
“I thought you and George had a parting of the ways.”
Quantrill shrugged. “That’s done with. Helping Price is more important than any disagreement between us, and George knows it. Actually, it’s a good thing I’ve come along. Last night George said he was thinking of attacking the blockhouse in Fayette—if you can imagine that. That’s folly and I told him so.”
As they talked, George Todd started up the rise toward them. They watched him come. Quantrill grinned and said, “I was just telling William T. how near to shooting each other we came last night.”
Todd’s face was tight in the way Bill knew it to get whenever he was spoiling for a fight. He stood over them and stared hard at Quantrill and said he’d decided to attack the Yank post at Fayette this morning.
Quantrill stared up at him. “That’s unwise, George.”
Todd spat. “If you’re too scared,” he said, “don’t join us in it. I wouldn’t ride with a fearful man anyhow.”
Quantrill and Bill got to their feet “It’s not a matter of being fearful, George,” Quantrill said. “It’s a question of good sense.”
Todd squared himself. “You saying I don’t have good sense?”
Quantrill sighed and turned to Bill. “Maybe he’ll listen to you.”
Todd cut his eyes to Bill, his gaze demanding to know who he sided with.
He thought Quantrill was likely right, no cavalry outfit could breach that highground blockhouse. You only had to look at it to see its invulnerability. Still, everything that had ever nettled him about Quantrill was roused and thumping angrily in his veins—the presumptuousness of the man, his condescension, his subtly mocking manner. He remembered Quantrill’s sly nuance to Todd about Bush’s past.
“Hell, we outnumber them at least four to one,” Bill said. “If we don’t fight with odds like that on our side, we ought to just put up our hands and surrender, let them shoot us against a wall.”
Todd grinned hugely. Quantrill looked from one to the other, and then turned up his palms in resignation.
It was over in fifteen minutes. Bill and Todd led the first two assaults, but there were twice as many Federals in the fort as they had thought, and the first Yank volley put down a dozen mounts and riders. The guerrillas never saw anything of the Yankees except their rifle muzzles jutting from the loopholes and issuing smoke, heard nothing from them but rifleshots and great rocking cheers each time a handful of horsemen went down in the risen dust and drifting haze of powdersmoke.
Bill circled back to the treeline where Quantrill was supposed to be ready to lead the next charge, but just as he got there, he saw Quantrill and his twenty boys cresting a hill a quarter-mile away at full gallop and then dropping out of sight beyond it. He would not see any of them again.
Quantrill had given a folded note to Sock Johnson for relay to Bill and Todd. Bill had already read it by the time George came riding up—wild-eyed and gasping, only half his men still horsed, the rest coming off the field on foot or lying wounded or dead on it. The note was a single line: “I won’t ride with fools.”
Todd cursed and balled the paper in his fist. “If that cowardly son of a bitch hadn’t run away,” he said, “we might’ve had the day! I’ll kill him, by God!” He drew a revolver and called for Bill to ride with him after Quantrill and his bunch.
But Bill was looking at the horseless bushwhackers staggering off the field and into the cover of the trees, most of them wounded, some of them badly, and he knew they couldn’t have won the day with even a hundred more men. He heard the cries of dying comrades and animals still out in the open, heard the Yankee rifles as they kept firing on whatever yet moved out there, and he felt the folly of the attack like a weight in his chest, felt himself made small by his own willfulness. All these men down because you didn’t want to say he was right. Well, he was right about that and right about you being a fool.
He argued against going in pursuit of Quantrill, saying they had too many wounded to gather up and get to someplace safe where they could be tended. Dave Pool and others agreed, and Todd reluctantly capitulated. But he was still in a rage, and even as they dragged their wounded off the field and doubled them up on the horses still serviceable, he pointed at Bill and said, “You’re wrong if you think he’s your friend. He’s nobody’s fucken friend! Next time I see him I’ll kill him where he stands without a damn hello, and woe to the man who tries to keep me from it.”
“Let’s go, George,” Bill said.
They left fifteen dead at Fayette and carried off forty wounded, and five of these died in the saddle and were hastily buried in the roadside woods. They navigated northward the afternoon long, distributing the most badly wounded at the farms of various Howard County friends, leaving them there to recover or not as they would.
Todd remained in sullen temper through the day, and Bill knew George was still rankled at him for refusing to chase after Quantrill. When they reached the Randolph County line that evening, he was not surprised by Todd’s announcement that he thought they could do a better job of distracting the Feds if they operated as smaller bands, so he was going his own way with his company. Dave Pool shrugged apologetically at Bill and took his bunch with Todd’s. Holtzclaw and his boys stayed with Bill.
MARLOWE’S FARM AND A HIGHER MEANNESS
I
nto Monroe County and wide fields of goldenrod, lush meadows of rose mallow, through dense green woodlands showing the first hints of amber. The men remark on the difference between the lingering greenness of these late September days and last year’s early leaffall.
At the farm of a family named Marlowe that swore they were secessionist, they took a noon meal of roasted potatoes and gravy, some of the men sitting on the floor of the crowded house, others out in the barn, some few with the horses hidden in a brushy ravine behind the house. The Marlowes’ two pubescent daughters were both afflicted with the skin disease called Saint Anthony’s fire, their faces so badly ravaged that some of the bushwhackers gaped in open revulsion while others politely averted their eyes.
Oz Swisby was the first to finish eating and went out on the porch to wait on the others. He had earlier taken off his Federal bluecoat and tucked it under his cantle, and the guerrilla shirt he wore was bright red. He took out his pipe and was in the midst of lighting it, humming the tune to “Come All Ye Fair and Tender Ladies,” when he was slammed backward by a Yankee rifleball that made instant ruin of his heart even as the gunshot was still on the air.
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.
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