Wildwood Boys (24 page)

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 thirtyfive 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 wellpleased 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 whirlaround 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 churchman’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.