Wildwood Boys (53 page)

A couple of weeks later, Todd got word that a Yankee patrol had
showed up at the Jorgenson farm and gone straight to the barn loft
where Yeager was hidden. They dangled him from a tree by his
ankles and shot him repeatedly until he looked like a side of raw beef
pasted with bloody rags. They tied him behind a horse and dragged
him into town and there decapitated him and told the citizens to
have a good look at how bushwhackers ended up. They rode off and
left his remains in the street for the townfolk to bury.

The word to George was that old Jorgenson had betrayed Dick
for a fat reward. When Todd went back to the Jorgenson place, the
old man came out of the house with his hands together like he was
praying. He swore he hadn’t been the one to inform. Todd had the
house searched, all the outbuildings, the well. A poke of U.S.
money—nearly $200—was uncovered behind a stone in the springhouse. Mrs. Jorgenson tried to shield her husband but Todd flung her
aside and clubbed the man with a singletree like he was trying to beat
out a fire. He broke his knees, his arms, his skull, then dragged him
broken and groaning into the house and set the place aflame. Then
sat his horse out front and watched the building burn while the old
woman stood by and shrieked like she’d gone crazy.

August wore on. The Kansas First Guerrillas were several times badly
bloodied. Two of their members were killed in a fight with militia in
lower Boone County, then two more in a scrap with a Federal detachment north of Rocheport. A company scout named Oliphant was
captured by the Feds and hanged before a crowd of civilians, then cut
down and his body burned by the roadside. For some of the new Yankee recruits the entire episode was so vehemently novel they cast up
their breakfast to the great amusement of their seasoned fellows.

Back in Carroll County and encamped on Wakenda Creek, the
company was ambushed by a Federal patrol in the middle of a
moonless night. Dock Rupe was on picket and cried out the alarm
just before he was throatcut by an Indian scout. The fight lasted ten
minutes and no man clearly saw another but only caught glimpses by
the flaring lights of the gunfire storm. The Yanks at last retreated,
nine of their dead left behind, and the guerrillas rode away in the
other direction, the dust of their departure settling in the darkness on
three of their own killed comrades.

Among the casualties was Bill himself, who’d been hit in the
upper arm by a bullet fragment without damage to the bone. Hi
Guess took a round in the thigh but would be all right to keep riding
with the company. Arch Clement was shot cleanly through the calf.
Frank James had been scraped on the side of the head by a passing
round and the long welt where the hair had been removed looked
more like a burn than a bullet wound.

The worst of the wounded was the younger James, who’d been
shot in the chest and two miles down the road fell off his horse. The
company halted long enough for comrades to hoist him back onto
his saddle and then Sock Johnson lashed the boy’s feet together
under his horse’s belly and tied him snugly to his saddle by the waist.
When they reined up at the Rudd farm to tend their wounds at last
and take a day’s shelter, the James boy was slumped unconscious
against his horse’s neck and the front of his shirt was weighted with
blood. His eyes fluttered as they carried him into the house and put
him on a bed. He coughed weakly and blood spilled over his
whiskerless chin. His breath rasped. The Rudd woman shooed the
men away and set to tending him. Not a man of them believed he
would survive the night, but at dawn he yet clung to the spirit.

As the company readied to ride off, he beckoned Bill to the bedside and whispered hoarsely that he would be ready to rejoin him by
the time they returned.

“Sure you will,” Bill said, and wished he believed it.

A month after losing his arm, Fletch Taylor was back with the company, his comrades much impressed with the swiftness of his recovery and the skill of his riding and shooting in spite of his crippling. “I
don’t need but one arm to fight a bunch of damn Yankees,” Taylor
said. “It’s anyhow more of a fair fight this way.”

Some days later, they ambushed a militia patrol near Russellville
and Taylor was at the forefront of the charge when his remaining
arm was hit from behind by a revolver round. Both bones of his
lower arm were shattered, but amputation was unnecessary. Still,
Fletcher Taylor took it for a sign that his luck was arrived at the rim
of the abyss. He told Bill he’d had enough and was quitting the war.
Bill gave him no argument. The next morning Fletch said so long to
them all and that he hoped they’d meet for a drink some day. As they
watched him being led away on his horse by a bushwhacker who
would see him home, somebody said softly, “I hope Fletch’s wife
truly loves him, else it’ll be a goodly while before his ass gets wiped
again.”

Inchoate legends

They said this about him, they said that, they said the other....
Everyone knew of his vanity, his adoration of his own hand

Tunes of this war

 

someness, his morning habit of inquiring of himself in a handmirror,

 

“Good morning, Captain Anderson. How fare you this morning,

 

sir?” and every time responding, “Why, I fare well, sir, very damn

 

well indeed.”

 

They had all heard of his black silk ribbon, and by some

 

accounts it now held more than a hundred knots. Some said that

 

he’d tied so many knots on top of knots that they couldn’t be

 

counted anymore, that the ribbon was drawn up into a single lump

 

of a knot, like a cancer grown big as a fist.

 

They said he had forever gone mad, that he rode into battle

 

screaming his sister’s name as foam flew off his lips, that in the midst

 

of a skirmish he would weep in becrazed fury because he could not

 

kill Federals fast enough. They said he carried a pirate’s sword to

 

chop off enemy heads.

 

They said he could commune with wolves, howling back and

 

forth with them over the miles of open prairie. That he could see in

 

the dark like a bat, could smell any lie. He could know the thoughts

 

of the dead when he stood over their graves. He could hear a human

 

heartbeat at a distance of fifty yards. He never slept. It would not

 

have surprised any who trafficked in such lore to learn he could set

 

fires with a hard stare, could look hard at an overhead hawk and see

 

the country all around as the raptor saw it.

 

They said he’d been shot upward of three dozen times and had

 

taken wounds that would have killed any other man, said he’d been

 

shot in the belly, in the head, shot where his
heart
should be—and

 

still he lived on. Some said he got his magical protection from his

 

wife, who was an Ozark goomer woman. Some whispered he’d

 

made a bargain with the Devil, though others said that made no

 

sense at all, that the Devil didn’t make bargains to gain what was

 

already coming to him. . . .

They are trotting in a double column through a wide meadow awash
in goldenrod and flanked by dense wildwood. Crows observe their
progress on this bright morning smelling faintly of woodfires. Riley
Crawford is telling a story of a one-eyed dog he used to own when he
was just a boy—Riley now all of sixteen—a dog given to poking
around the creek in search of adventure who one day was bitten on the
nose by a snapping turtle that wouldn’t turn loose for love or money.

“I mean to tell you,” Riley says, “you never heard such a holler
as that poor dog was raising. I had to—”

 

His hat tilts and jumps from his head with a portion of his skull
still in it and his head jerks around as if he would see where it was
going—but he is already dead and the rifle report fading as he rolls
off his horse and sinks into the tide of yellow flowers and the yelping
company goes scattering into the cover of the trees.

 

They spent the rest of the morning searching the surrounding
country for the sniper, for some sign of a unit he might belong to.
The videttes reported no hint of Feds in the area. The guerrillas were
convinced the shooter was a loner who was still in his nook up in a
tree or under a bush and they were enraged that they could not flush
him out.

 

“The son of a bitch is probably looking at us right this minute
with a shiteating grin,” Frank James said, scanning the wildwood all
around. “I almost wish he’d shoot another one of us, just so we
could get an idea where he’s at.”

 

They retrieved Riley Crawford from the field of flowers. In death
the boy looked even smaller than his diminutive living self, seemed
even younger, a child in oversized garb playing at war. They lashed
him to his horse and rode on.

 

Two miles down the road they arrived at a small farm where
lived a young couple and their three small children. While some of
the guerrillas searched the outbuildings and others went through the
house, still others made use of the farmer’s pick and shovel to bury
Riley Crawford in a small clearing in the trees behind the house.

 

Bill asked the farmer if his allegiance was Union or southern. The
man was hesitant, wondering perhaps if he was faced with true Federals or guerrillas in disguise—or Federals pretending to be guerrillas
in disguise. Then said he wasn’t either one, he just wanted to stay as
far out of the war as he could.

 

Bill spat. “That line’s been too long worn away for anybody to
stand on it,” he said. “You best pick a side, mister. Go ahead, pick—
maybe you’ll guess right. Or you can just tell the truth and say what
you really believe.”

 

“I used to believe Jesus was coming,” the man said. “But anymore I believe he’s changed his mind.”

 

Bill made a small smile. “My, that is a hopeless outlook.”
Butch Berry heard this as he brought his horse up beside Bill’s.
“He got reason to be hopeless—look here.” He handed Bill a Union
army cap. “The boys found it in a corner of the barn.”
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.