Wildwood Boys

by James Carlos Blake

  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.

  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.

  OLD PAP

  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.

  As the bushwhackers rode off down the street, Bill presented Price with a pair of silver-mounted revolvers he had acquired from a Federal wagon train earlier in the summer. The general was appreciative and invited him into his private office for brandy and a cigar. They exchanged a few brief compliments and then Price told of his plan to advance on Kansas City. He needed the guerrillas to disrupt Yankee rail transport and to distract Federals from K.C. He had already given Quantrill and Todd their assignments. He wanted Bill to con
tinue harassing the Federals throughout central Missouri and to inflict all the damage he could to the Northern Missouri rail line. He gave him a copy of a special order that specified exactly that mission. Bill read it and folded it and put it in his jacket. There was an awkward pause; then Price cleared his throat and consulted his pocket watch and said he regretted to cut short their meeting, but…

  As they left Boonville behind them, somebody joked that Price probably weighed more than twice as much as Arch.

  “He maybe weighs twice more than me, but he ain’t any more man than me,” Archie said. “Looked a little too tender about our prizes, you ask me.”

  Butch asked Bill what Old Pap had to say.

  “Said if he had ten thousand like us he could take Missouri and hold it forever.”

  “Ten thousand!” Hi Guess said. “Shoot, we had ten thousand like us, Bill would be the general and Price maybe be a sergeant.”

  Bill had to grin.

  “If we had ten thousand like us,” Butch said, “we wouldn’t need Price nor anybody else to own the whole damn state ourselves. To win the whole damn war!”

  “If Fletch Taylor was here,” Jim said, “you know what he’d say.”

  They laughed, and several of them intoned together, “If a frog had wings…”

  A PLEDGE

  Beloved husband—

  Poor Lamar sees me talking in agitation to myself and must think I am quite mad. He does not know I am addressing you, pleading my argument that you come home. I can say it no plainer: DAMN the war. Please, Bill, be quit of it. Come home. Think of us in our lovely tub, our own little boat out on the wide sea and away from all this troubled world….

  Dearest wife—

  I still kill the enemy where he presents himself to me, but oh my love, I am so sick of killing them! I would quit this war on the instant, but I cannot quit my men,—and for all their disappointment in Price, they will not abandon him. Yet only a fool will deny that if Price is defeated in his next engagement he will be finished,—and Missouri finished with him. Therefore have I made a bargain with myself which I present to you as a pledge: I swear to you that on the day Pap is beaten, I will be shed of my duties of captaincy and will come home to you. May resolutions come quickly, so I may fly to your embrace….

  RESOLUTIONS

  They ambushed Union patrols nearly every day, made Union informers to know the terrible error of their ways. Unloosed storms of gunfire on every steamboat they spotted, shot apart telegraph lines. Ranged over the hills and all along the bottoms of the wildwoods of central Missouri.

  In the course of a skirmish with a large militia force in Howard County, Hi Guess received a bullet in the chest and one in the belly. Frank James cradled him in his arms and others stood and watched Hi’s legs weakly kick in the dirt, his eyes wide but seeing none of them as he addressed a woman named Clarissa, telling her he loved her truly and wanted to marry her and to please wait for him. Then he was dead and they made haste in putting him in the earth.

  A week later they were traversing an open stretch of country in Chariton County when a Federal cavalry company four times their size loomed over a hill and charged them. The guerrillas raced for the wildwood just beyond a low rise, and once again their superior horses easily outdistanced the Yankee mounts. Most of the company was already on the high ground when Buster Parr’s horse was shot from under him. Buster had been bringing up the rear and was still on the prairie and none of them knew he’d gone down until Butch Berry looked back and saw him a hundred yards behind and the Yankees closing on him.

  Butch brought his horse about and watched as the Yankees drew up around Buster and some of them dismounted and pulled him to his feet. Buster was favoring a leg and Butch heard his distant scream when one of the Yanks kicked it. The horse was screaming too, lying on its side and kicking awkwardly, and a Federal dispatched it with a bullet.

  The other bushwhackers had now seen Butch halted and realized the Yanks had left off the chase. Bill told Arch Clement to stay with the men and be ready to lead them away fast, then he and Jim rode back to where Butch sat his horse at the rim of the rise.

  The Feds had formed a battle line to either side of the dismounted soldiers clustered around Buster and holding him upright. Some of the Yanks were spitting on him and punching him. One hit him in the head with a rifle butt.

  “Son of a bitch!” Butch Berry said.

  The Federals were waving to them now, beckoning, pointing at Buster as if daring them to come for their man.

  Butch drew his Colt and turned to Bill, his face wild. “Let’s do something!”

  “Do what, goddammit!” Jim Anderson said. “You so one-eyed blind you can’t see there’s two hundred fucken Feds down there? We’re not fifty.”

  “Bill!” Butch said.

  Bill Anderson looked at him. Then looked back to Buster among the Yankees. “I can’t risk the whole company for one man,” he said.

  The Federal commander moved his horse up behind Buster and drew his saber. He raised it high for the watching guerrillas to see. The blade caught the sun and flashed as the officer brought it down and Buster’s head slumped sideways, and even at this distance they saw the bright glint of blood that arced from his severed neck.

  The soldiers let him fall and some of them kicked him even as he lay dying or already dead. They tied his feet to the end of a rope attached to a saddle and they waved at the spectating guerrillas once more and rode away, dragging Buster’s remains behind them.

  “Let’s go,” Bill said, reining Edgar Allan around.

  The man was lost, he tells himself, lying in his blanket that night. There was nothing to be done for it.

  You were his captain.

  It would have been worse than folly. The circumstance was clear.

  Ah, the circumstance. Of course. But tell me, Captain: was it that you did not dare to risk your own life, now you’ve told the lady you’ll return to her on Price’s imminent defeat? Tell me true.

  The company is my chief charge. I cannot risk the entire company for one man.

  Yes, of course. Quantrill always said you were a sly debater. Do you not recall your upbraiding of him for placing circumstance above his man? More to the point, Captain, I ask you this: if not the entire company, how many will you risk for one man? Half the company? Ten men? One? And I ask you, sir: if a man of the company is not worth the risk of at least one of his comrades—and if that one is not you, the captain of them, then what are you captain of? And still more to the point: what are you?

  Maybe I never was but a damned horse thief.

  He stares at the utterly uninterested stars and berates himself in a howling silence, curses himself for an irresolute weakling and for being the sort of pathetic fool who wishes he could have a moment back again so he might use it properly. Fool! A man takes an action or he does not—and then the moment is fled to wherever all moments in relentless succession do irretrievably flee.

  The Federals had retreated through Independence street by street, giving way and breaking apart before Jo Shelby’s relentless rebels and the guerrillas spearheading for him. In a small clearing in a stand of sycamores at the edge of town, a dozen bloodsmeared Kansas cavalrymen led by redbearded Doc Jennison—once the jayhawking scourge of the borderland and now a Federal colonel—hastily tied off their wounds and cursed the God that ever permitted the notion of Missouri to enter the mind of man.

  “Colonel, look there!” A trooper pointed to a ridge about a quarter-mile distant, where a rider sat his horse and surveyed the town below. There were no trees behind him and he made a stark silhouette against the sky.

  “The cheek of the bastard!” Jennison said. “Out in the open as bold as you please. Got an angel on his shoulder, don’t you know.” He turned to one of the men and said, “Hand me that Spence.”

  The man passed over the Spencer carbine and said, “I’m not real sure, Captain, but looks like he’s in blue.”

  “He’s a bushwhacker,” Jennison said,
levering a .56-caliber round and cocking the hammer and bracing the barrel on a sycamore stump. “I can tell a bushwhacker from a mile off.”

  “What if he’s not? “another man said. “What if he’s really one of ours?”

  “Then he’s got this coming for being such a damned fool,” Jennison said.

  As Jennison took aim, the horseman stood up in the stirrups for a better view and made an even sharper target of himself. “Good Christ, boy,” Jennison said softly. “you might as well whistle for it.” He held a breath and squeezed off the round.

  “Captain Todd stood up in the stirrups to have a better look, and bang, his neck pops open. He never made a sound, he just fell. There was no stopping the blood. He couldn’t talk, but his eyes were moving over all of us like he was looking for somebody. Then he gives this big grin like he found him, only it was like he was looking at something the rest of us couldn’t see. He died smiling, no telling at what.”

  Relating this report was Charley Webb, who’d ridden with Todd until two days ago. He’d then sought out Bill Anderson’s company in Carroll County to join with them.

  “Captain Pool said he wasn’t about to bury Captain Todd out in the woods when there was a perfectly good cemetery right there in the town. So we carried him down and got us a couple of shovels from a livery and started digging a hole for him. Next thing we know, here comes this fella in a suit and tie who says his name’s Beattie and we’re digging in his family plot and he won’t stand for some stranger buried there. Said as soon as we were gone he was going to have his man dig up the body and throw it in the river. Captain Pool told him he lived in Kansas City and intended to come to Independence every few weeks to put flowers on his friend’s grave, and if he ever heard so much as a rumor that George had been dug up, he would find Beattie and put him in a grave and all his family in there with him. Well, that shut up Mr. Beattie fast enough, but just to ease the matter for him, Captain Pool gave him a fistful of money and that seemed to improve the fella’s disposition a whole lot. By the time we were patting down the dirt on Todd’s grave, Mr. Beattie had brought some flowers from somewhere to put on it.”