Agnes Canon's War

by Deborah Lincoln

  Vandever’s house, nothing more than a shack, squatted in the center of a dark clearing, its door open and outlined in firelight. The first round of shots burst from brush to the north of the yard, and Lefever and Private Rapp dropped. Billy and the remaining two yanked back on their reins as men poured out of bushes on foot yodeling the unearthly yell Billy’d come to associate with rebels and battle. In the rain and the darkness, he shot his pistol into the melee and wheeled his horse back down the road. By the time he’d returned to camp, gathered his men and surrounded the cabin, Lefever was dead, shot three times at close range through the head. Rapp had been shot twice at close range, and his pockets turned inside out, but he lived. Vandever and the attackers had disappeared.

  So this morning both Billy and Roecker craved a fight. The rain eased up but the sky hung low and threatening, the light murky and dim. They sent out scouting forays at first light, and by mid-morning were gathered in the foreyard of a tavern standing at the edge of a fenced cornfield. Corporal DeGroat trained his carbines on three civilians, one of them Vandever. Roecker ordered his men to surround the tavern and the cornfield, and push into the woods alongside the road, and the men scattered, leaving Billy and Joe in the yard with the prisoners and their guards. Ralph Mooney, a blacksmith from Platte City, jammed the butt of his rifle into Vandever’s kidneys. The man moaned and sank to the ground, and Mooney kicked him for good measure.

  Billy leaned over the pommel of his saddle and looked down. Vandever, face blotched with purple liver spots, huddled in the mud, moaning. The other two civilians were younger, and their eyes shifted with the wary look of feral dogs.

  Vandever’s eyes opened, and he shifted to a sitting position. “You ain’t got no call to hurt us, Captain,” he said. “We ain’t with them ’whackers.”

  “And they forced you to lure us to your cabin last night?” Billy’s horse pranced, and he drew it in.

  “They had my boys here, said they’d kill them if I don’t play along.”

  “I can almost believe that, Vandever. Except you were gone when we got back. All I found was a dead lieutenant. Shot dead after he was down. Where’re the men who did it?” He nodded at Mooney, who kicked the old man again in the kidneys. Vandever cried out, and one of his boys swore and shoved an elbow into the belly of his guard.

  At that instant shots sounded, far enough away to sound like popguns. They came from the cornfield, and Billy saw men running on foot from the woods, clambering over the rail fence and ducking among the newly planted rows, dodging shots. After them rode men on horses, his men and Joe’s, jumping the fence or plowing through it. The riders surrounded the field, galloped ahead of the running figures and penned them in, and shot, again and again. One horse reared back, its rider flinging up his arms and sliding off over the rump, and Billy watched as another horse collapsed with a scream. Then it was over, and the riders milled around, one or another taking a last lone shot at whatever moved on the ground. The tender shoots of the cornfield had been trampled into a muck of blood and mud, the rail fence scattered. Billy glanced back at Roecker, who watched the field, nodding in approval. Then he lifted his head toward the group at the tavern’s door.

  “Guess we don’t need you, now,” Billy said. “Shoot ’em.” He whirled his horse and trotted into the road without looking back.

  

  Two days later, Billy, Joe and their men marched into Carroll County, planning to reach the Missouri River and circle back to Jefferson City by the end of the month, when an officer from McNeil’s regiment brought news of guerilla attacks all across the northern counties. He mentioned that, among other places, Holt County had been hit and there’d been killings in Lick Creek and Mound City. Billy gathered up a hand-picked crew of Holt County men from Company B, left Roecker to return to Jefferson City with the rest, and headed west.

  37

  May 1863

  John and Nancy’s brood gathered on a lovely May evening for a birthday celebration. Agnes and Jabez were invited, but he attended to a birthing over toward Forest City, so she walked alone to the house by the school. Elizabeth and Tom, Sarah and her new husband crowded around the table. Rebecca and Johnny, the only two Jacksons left at home, took charge of the young Kreeks. Everyone sorely missed James, off in Kansas City learning to shoot a Sharps rifle and to march in formation, hoping to join Billy’s company for the summer.

  They ate on a trestle table in the yard, shaded by a maple John had planted when they’d first moved in, and watched the sun set in a riot of orange and gray-purples, fat clouds hovering on the horizon gilt-edged and magical. Fireflies winked on outside as candles and lamps winked on inside, and when mosquitoes began to bite, they hustled the Kreeks’ little ones into the house over their objections. The men gathered in the front room and lit up cigars, the women clustered in the kitchen finishing the dishes, brewing coffee, serving up deep-dish pie made from the last of the winter-stored apples, tart and spicy and still hot from the oven. Agnes sat in a rocker in the kitchen with Elizabeth’s newest child, Harry, at eight months a husky little thing with a powerful pair of lungs, a frizz of red hair and an appetite like a fledgling hawk. The children clattered overhead in one of the bedrooms, playing some game that involved romping on beds and frequent screeching, overseen by the resourceful Rebecca. The adults chattered among themselves, relaxing among friends for a few hours of peace and comfort, shutting out the chaos beyond the walls.

  Nancy saw them first, out the kitchen window, as she bent over the dishpan to rinse an empty pie plate, and she screamed. The women froze, but the men leaped to their feet and crowded into the kitchen. John peered into the darkness over his wife’s shoulder, and his face hardened. He stood more than a head taller than Nancy, his silvering hair glistening in the lamplight, a scowl deepening the creases in his forehead and the laugh lines around his mouth, his always-gentle eyes stormy.

  “Tom,” he said to his son-in-law, “lock the door in the front room. Jim,”—Sarah’s husband—”fetch the shotgun from the bedroom. It’s under the bed.” Agnes heard horses now, shying and dancing in the back yard, and voices calling one to another.

  John yanked the curtains over the window, turned the key in the back door lock. “Sarah, take the baby upstairs and keep the children quiet. If there’s fire you may need to go out the window.” Someone pounded on the front door. Agnes handed Harry to Sarah, and John touched his hand to his daughter’s cheek. “I’m counting on you. Use the front bedroom, keep the children out of sight.” They crept out of the room as John blew out the lamp. The room plunged into gloom, shadows thick in the corners, only the front room fireplace throwing a flickering light against the ceiling.

  Nancy clutched Johnny who insisted he would stand with the men. His mother insisted he would not. The pounding on the front door increased, and a voice Agnes thought she recognized called for John Jackson to open up. John lifted the shotgun from Jim Ramsey and stood to the side of the door.

  “Willard Bigelow,” he shouted.

  “Open up, John,” Bigelow called. “My boys’re in need of food, and I hear tell Mrs. Nancy’s a right good cook.”

  “We don’t have much, Willard,” John said. “Had a family dinner and ate everything.” He glanced around at us, at the untouched dishes of pie. “You men dismount and lay down your guns, we got some pie here. And coffee.”

  “No, John,” Nancy said, clutching his arm. “Don’t open that door, they don’t mean any good.”

  “I know that. Stay back now, away from the window.” He gestured to Tom Kreek. “Get into the bedroom, see what you can see.”

  The first-floor bedroom faced the town. Surely someone had noticed a band of horsemen riding up at dusk. But the good citizens of Lick Creek learned early in the war to lock their doors, close their blinds and keep their heads down, and no one stirred on the dark street. Agnes followed Tom into the bedroom and peered over his shoulder. Four riders pranced on skittish moun
ts in the front yard, and she thought she spotted another stationed to the side of the house, almost beyond view.

  “Well, now, family dinner is it?” Willard stepped off the porch and scanned the second floor windows. “So you got all your men in there?”

  “What is it you want, Bigelow?”

  Agnes heard the back door crash open, and the next moments passed in the slow motion of a dream, a dream in which her body refused to obey the commands of her mind. Someone cried out—Nancy—and another swore. Figures swarmed into the dark kitchen, bringing with them the acrid smells of rank bodies and unwashed clothes, horses and bad tobacco. A man pushed past Agnes, drew back his arm, and she heard a crack like a tree limb snapping, and Jim Ramsey collapsed in a heap at her feet. Elizabeth stood at the foot of the stairs, spewing invective and swinging an iron fry-pan. An explosion, a flash, a groan, then another shot, and in the wavering light from the fireplace, Agnes watched John drop to his knees, shotgun clutched in both hands. A stranger, face hidden behind a matted beard, snatched the gun and smashed the butt into the lock on the front door. It swung open and more dark figures pushed their way in. One carried a lantern whose glare washed over the carnage and seared Agnes’s eyes. She flattened herself against the wall and stared.

  Jim lay stretched across the kitchen threshold. Tom Kreek pressed a fist to his shoulder, blood dripping through his fingers. Nancy planted both hands on the chest of a man who stood before her grinning, and pushed so hard he stumbled backwards with an oath onto an upturned footstool. She dropped to her knees at her husband’s side, scrabbling at his hands, his cheeks, wadding her apron into the sticky pool gathering between his shoulder blades.

  A fist closed on Agnes’s elbow and wrenched her around until she stared into the scarred face of Willard Bigelow. Behind the stubble and greasy moustache, his lips twitched, and he laughed a low, raspy sound. He waved a revolver in his other hand, and she smelled powder and oil when he brushed it against her cheek.

  “Well, if it ain’t Missus Robinson,” he said, his breath like spoiled eggs. “Where’s the good doctor?”

  “Not here.” She twisted in his grip.

  He tightened his hold. “You tell him for me this is payback.” He pointed the revolver at John. Agnes snatched for his gun hand, and he whipped it back, pointed at Nancy, said “Bang!” and tipped the gun to the ceiling. He tittered like a schoolboy, dropped her arm and shouted an order. Within moments they disappeared, slipping out the doors, calling to each other with a laugh and a whoop, mounting up and thundering past the schoolhouse, up the road to the north.

  An instant of deadly quiet settled over the house, then Sarah clattered down the stairs, hollering to Rebecca to mind the children. Jim moaned and struggled to sit up. Elizabeth knelt beside Tom, ripping his shirt open, blood on her bodice. Johnny lay where they’d kicked him, curled around bruised ribs. Agnes dropped beside him and stroked a hand over his wet check.

  John Jackson was dead. The bullet lodged in the center of his back, and he’d dropped to his knees and died without a sound. Nancy, blood smearing her face and hands, lay across him, her plump figure heaving.

  

  “Damn! I should have been there.” Jabez thumped his fist on the wall, then covered his face with his hands.

  “What good could you have done?” Agnes wheeled away from the stove and jabbed her hands on her waist, too tired for tears. It was four o’clock in the morning following the attack, and she reeled with exhaustion. “You would have been killed too. Or instead.”

  “Better me than John.”

  “Oh, don’t be a hero.” She glowered at him and turned back to the sizzling skillet.

  Jabez dropped into a chair and tipped his head back, eyes on the ceiling. “I know Bigelow. I know how to handle him. It was me he was after. I could have talked him down.”

  She wrapped her hand in her apron, hefted the skillet and dished eggs onto a plate. She poured coffee, carried the plate and mug to the table and set them in front of him. He straightened, hands on knees, staring inward and far away, and Agnes realized his cheeks were wet. She’d never before seen him cry, not even when they’d buried Sarah and Charlie. She sank down on the chair next to him, grasped his hands in hers.

  “My darling husband,” she said. “It does no good to blame yourself. This is senseless, this is insanity. You were busy birthing a new life while another was taken. A good man’s life was taken, and I can hardly bear it. But you can’t be responsible, you can’t allow yourself to think that way. That’s the road to madness.”

  “He was my friend.”

  “I know. And mine.”

  He turned to her then, leaned his forehead against hers, his eyes closed. “Agnes,” he whispered. “I’m sorry.” They stayed that way for a moment longer and then he drew in a deep breath and swiveled back to his food, lifted the fork, ate a bite, lay down the fork. He dropped the napkin next to his plate and pushed back, stood. “I should have been there,” he said and left the room.

  

  Billy arrived with a contingent of militia the week after John’s funeral. Agnes thought again about the killing yet to come. Maybe Billy would die, maybe James. Maybe if this infernal war continued, even Johnny would march off to slaughter. Death had taken her children, no future generation would follow her or Jabez. So many men and boys dead, so many still to die, as if the neck of the hourglass had constricted so that only a single grain might pass at a time.

  

  The Holt County supporters of the Union, led by Rufus Byrd and Aldo Beaton, rushed to the defense of the Jackson widow and orphans, dispensing their own brand of justice for the murder of their friend. Miranda Bigelow, Wil and Jake’s mother, watched with tears on her cheeks, her younger children clustered about her, while Byrd and Beaton arrested Reuben. They convicted him by court-martial of harboring and provisioning bushwhackers and shipped him to a typhoid-ridden prison in Cincinnati. Within five months, the big one-armed man who’d been a friend to all was dead and buried.

  38

  May 1863

  Billy rode into Lick Creek for an afternoon, stayed through dinner and rode off again to search for Bigelow without taking the time to visit his wife and daughters in Forest City. The evening he left, the women lined the Jackson front porch like a row of crows on a clothesline, black mourning dresses whipping about their ankles in a brisk damp breeze, their men behind them in the shadows, the younger children subdued and frightened. Jim Ramsey, revolver on his hip and carbine over his shoulder, had joined Billy’s company as a civilian, and he and Sarah walked apart, saying their goodbyes.

  Billy shook hands with the men. Tom Kreek’s arm nestled in a sling, the bruises on his face the color of pea soup. When Billy reached his father, he held out a hand, and Sam grasped it. Billy pulled the old man into his arms and held tight. Sam pushed away and looked abashed. Billy grinned at him and punched him on the shoulder.

  Jabez leaned against the porch rail, and Billy hesitated before he stepped over to him. The doctor had aged since Billy’d seen him last—he’d lost weight, and his cheeks were sunken, a thick web of lines creased his forehead and shot out from the corners of his eyes. His beard, once black and soft, bristled with gray.

  “Doc,” Billy said.

  “Billy,” the doctor said. He said nothing more, and Billy flushed. He stared over the yard toward the old schoolhouse, turned back to the man in front of him.

  “Maybe,” he said, fixing on a spot over Jabez’s right shoulder, “maybe if your friends come back to town you can get them to lay off the family.”

  Jabez let out a breath, his eyelids drooped, then raised, and he looked straight into Billy’s eyes. “Billy, they hate me as much as you hate them. That’s all they are, is hate. They believe nothing, they stand for nothing.”

  “All the same,” said Billy.

  “You’re after Bigelow.”

  “And his gang, yeah.�
�

  “I may get him first.”

  Billy’s eyes narrowed. “How’s that?”

  “If he’s still in this area, I’ll find him. That’s one thing I can do with my connections. And if I find him, I’ll take care of him.” The doctor spoke softly.

  Billy regarded him for some moments. He stuck out his hand. “Here’s to us, then, Doc,” he said, and they shook.

  Rachel, white and drawn, said nothing when Billy put his arms around her and kissed her cheek. Nancy sobbed and shook. She held James to her, her head no higher than his new stiff blue collar. Billy’s new recruit. He’d resisted signing up James. The boy was nineteen, plenty old enough, the same age as maybe half of Billy’s Boys. But he was James—the rambunctious boy under everyone’s feet, the one who never went to bed when he was told, who grabbed life with both hands, everyone’s favorite— and Billy ached at the idea of putting him in danger. Billy glanced at Agnes. Her eyes brimmed with tears she couldn’t hold much longer. She caught his look and sent one back: I’m holding you responsible. Keep him safe. Billy nodded, a quick jerk of his head.

  James stepped back, jammed his kepi on his curls, plunged a hand into his pocket. Withdrew his black shiny arrowhead and held it high. “Kiss it, Ma, for luck,” and Nancy did. “We’ll be back!” He gave it a toss, caught it and swung onto his tall sorrel with the white blaze. Ramsey climbed into the saddle, they waved and were gone.