Wildwood Boys (58 page)

 

But now they hear distant rebel yells of warning and see Butch
Berry and Tom Tuckett, one of the night pickets, riding hard out of
the northern treeline, about a furlong distant.

 

“Yanks!” Jim says. “A
bunch
of them, judging by those boys’
hollering!”

 

A half-dozen Missouri militiamen, the advance riders, come galloping out of the woods, all of them with revolvers in hand, trailing
Butch and Tuckett by a hundred yards.

 

“Make for the south wood, boys!” Bill shouts. “Go!”

 

In seconds the company is ahorse and riding hard up the hill, Bill
and Jim and Arch bringing up the rear. Butch and young Tuckett are
fifty yards behind them and pulling away from the militia pointmen.

 

Then Tuckett’s horse is hit and goes down. The boy tumbles like
a flung doll—but he scrambles to his feet and starts firing at the
pointmen and drops a horse and rider.

 

Butch Berry reins about and starts back for him.

 

Bill pulls Edgar Allan around at the foot of the hill as the rest of
the militia force comes bursting out of the trees three hundred yards
away. They look to be thrice the guerrillas’ number.

 

The rest of the company vanishes over the hilltop, but Jim and
Arch rein up on the crest and look back and Jim hollers,
“Bill!”

 

The militia pointmen are shooting as they close on Tuckett and
are forty yards from him when the boy staggers and falls. Butch reins
up hard beside him and alights from the saddle and pulls him to his
feet and tries to get him onto the horse but the animal shies, then
bolts away. Supporting Tuckett with one arm, Butch shoots with the
other and two militia horses go down shrieking, their riders flailing
over the ground. The other three Yanks go galloping past him, all of
them shooting, and Butch brings down another horse just as he is hit
and he drops to his knees, still clutching Tuckett to him.

 

Twenty yards beyond Butch, the pair of remaining militia pointmen rein around and draw spare pistols.

 

Bill hears Jim shout, “Come on—they’re lost!” He sees Butch
struggling to his feet and refusing to unhand his comrade. The militia force is coming hard on a rising howl and hardly a hundred yards
from him.

 

He heels Edgar Allan into a sprint and closes up fast behind the
pointmen as they fire on Butch, and Butch sits down hard and Tuckett slips from him. Bill shoots one of the Yanks off his horse and the
other looks back big-eyed and then ducks low in the saddle and veers
away at a hard gallop.

 

He pulls Edgar Allan up short beside Butch, who is risen to one
knee. He yells his name and leans from the saddle and puts his hand
down to him as the Union troop thunders toward them in a storm of
hooves and gunfire. Edgar Allan flinches and yelps and then is hit
again. A rifleball hums a hole in Bill’s hatbrim, his right leg jerks and
goes numb, a bullet cuts through his jacket and burns his ribs.

 

Butch looks up, his face streaked with blood, his shirt drenched
red. He sees it is Bill and grins wide and white—and reaches up and
clasps his hand.

 

And in that instant—his own grin feeling hugely grand—Bill sees
a glorious incandescence and nothing more. . . .

As the larger portion of the militia outfit chased the Kansas First
Guerrillas into the wildwood, the jubilant commanding officer and a
few others stood gathered around Bill Anderson and looked on the
handsome unmarred face, the blue-rimmed hazel eyes. They couldn’t
believe it was him, but the orders from General Price that they
found in his pocket confirmed it. Some of the militiamen unsheathed
their knives but the CO said no, not yet, he wanted the body fully
recognizable.

They confiscated a wagon from a nearby farm and loaded him
onto it, the back of his head soggy with blood where the pistolball
smashed his skull. Then they bore him away, singing “Battle Hymn
of the Republic” as they went. Butch Berry and Tom Tuckett they
had scalped and stripped of their blue uniforms and slashed with
sabers and mutilated in their private parts and beaten with rifle butts
until none who ever knew them would have recognized their
remains, which were left to the ants and crows.

They took him to Richmond, the Ray County seat, and laid him out
in the courthouse for everyone to see. Some of the authorities both
military and civilian cut locks of his hair for mementos before he was
put on public display, stripped of the Union bluecoat, clad in his artful shirt. Also on public view were his six Navy Colts, a scalp taken
from his horse’s bridle, some letters from his wife, a likeness of her
and one of him and her together, a lock of hair presumed to be hers,
a poke containing six hundred dollars in greenbacks and specie, a
pair of gold pocketwatches. But the article that drew the most prolonged and intense regard was his black silk ribbon with its knots.
Many who looked on it made effort at a careful count, and yet no
two sums agreed, varying from forty-eight to sixty-one. Some swore
for a fact it held more than a hundred.

His horse and one of his Navies were awarded to the officer in
command of the hunting party that brought him down. His watches
and the rest of the guns went to the other officers. The money was
divided among the enlisted men of the force, and some of them
would never spend their share but keep it as a souvenir. All other of
his articles, including the black ribbon, would disappear before
evening and no one would know where they went.

The local photographist was summoned and Bill Anderson was
propped up in a chair and pistols placed in his hands and pictures
made. A journalist on the scene jokingly asked if the guns were
empty—and could not keep from laughing aloud when an officer
snatched them from the corpse and removed the cartridges before
putting the pistols back in the dead man’s hands.

They kept him on exhibit all through the day, then lighted the
courthouse with torches and extra lamps and let people look on him
into the night as well. As the news of his death had spread, gawkers
from every county roundabouts came to join the long line and have
their own look. Not until well after midnight had the last of them
come and gone, and taken with them a tale to tell again and again.

But the best of the tales would belong to the few locals who went
out on the street quite early next morning and spied something odd
atop the telegraph pole at the end of the courthouse street. On drawing nearer and looking harder, they saw it was the head of Bloody
Bill Anderson. The Yankee commander was notified and he ordered
it removed, but he made no effort to know who committed the act,
and no one cared that he did not, and all that day militiamen were
smiling.

They buried his remains in an unmarked grave but everyone
knew which plot it was, because for weeks after, every time a soldier
in the vicinity had the need to piss, that was where he’d do it. Even
after the army departed Richmond, no grass did grow on that grave
thereafter, and some said it was not army piss that had burned the
plot barren, but the hellfire from below.

“And I don’t want no pardon . . .”

He rode with the company down to Arkansas where they would
make their winter camp and there said goodbye to them and shook
hands with Arch Clement, their newly elected captain. Then he rode
on to the Red and ferried across it and made his way to her place and
found it abandoned.

The yard had gone to high weed and the cabin was missing its
oversized door and had been ransacked of all furniture, including the
big tub. He went into town and learned that the Purple Moon had
changed ownership and was now called the High Hat. Most of the
girls who had worked there last winter had moved on, but one who
had not was a girl named Amanda. She told him that when the news
of Bill’s death came to Sherman, several girls who knew her went out
to the house to offer condolences, but Bush would not receive them,
refused even to answer their halloos. The Hundley boy finally came
from around back of the house and told them to go away. He obviously took the news badly too, for that night he came to town and
got terribly and belligerently drunk and picked a fight with a pair of
teamsters, and when it was over, one teamster lay dead and so did
Lamar Hundley. A few days after that she was gone and no one
knew where.

He navigated westward, hired on as line rider on a New Mexican
ranch through the remainder of the winter, then moved on in the first
warm days of spring. He shivered in the high passes and sweltered in
the deserts, went weeks without encountering another soul during
which he spoke to no one but himself and his horse. What he most
often spoke of were the days when he and his brother were at the
rustling trade with their father. He recounted to his mount the thrill
of those nights when they drove the horses at a gallop under the
moon and stars. Sometimes he spoke of his sisters, whom he had not
seen since before their crippling in Kansas City. He’d heard that all
the women prisoners had now been exiled from the state, but he had
no notion at all where the girls might be. He heard the news of Appomattox nearly two months after the fact. And a report that Quantrill
had been killed, though none knew where or even if it was true.

He rode after his shortening shadow every morning and played it
out behind him in the dying day’s last red light. He held to this
course until it delivered him to the end of the continent. The sight of
the Pacific—brightly blue, undulant and endless—made him lightheaded. He took off his boots and walked barefoot in the wet sand
and each time jumped back from the rushing surf as if it might
snatch him away.

He took employment as a keeper of the peace in a nameless San
Diego bordello and never had to use his pistol except once when a bad
actor cut him across the ribs and he shot the fellow’s knee to fragments. He lived in a room over a cafe and kept to himself and no one
called him friend. Now and then he visited with one of the house girls.

One day he heard someone say Christmas was two weeks hence,
and he was astonished to realize how long he had been in this land of
perpetual sunshine and greenery and soft seawind, where there were
no seasons to mark time’s passage.

The next day he started back.

He arrived in Kansas City on a night of wind and bitter cold. He
recalled the last time he had been here and the hard rain falling and
the three who were with him and now all of them dead. He supposed
that many of the men who had been here that night were now dead.
He went into a crowded saloon and stood at the bar and drank
whiskey in the clamor of men and women in desperate chase of
pleasure. At every opening of the door, the sudden draft fluttered the
lantern flames and the yellow light quavered on the walls. The place
was hazed with smoke. In the heavy heat of the various potbellied
stoves glowing red, the chief smells were of men unbathed and the
cloying perfume of the whores.

The saloon grew louder and smokier and more crowded, the bar
now packed four deep. He had just received a fresh drink when
someone jostled his arm and most of the whiskey sloshed onto the
bar. The man who did it had his back to him and wasn’t even aware
of the accident. A Federal sergeant in the company of two comrades.

“Hey, you!” He thumped the sergeant on the back with the heel
of his hand. The man whirled with a glare.

 

“You owe me a drink.” He gestured at the spilled whiskey.

 

The Fed regarded him closely. “I’ll be go to hell,” he said, his
words barely audible over the din of music and song and loud talk
and laughter. “I thought we’d killed all you bushrats or run you out
of Missouri.”

 

“He’s one for sure, Silas,” one of the other soldiers said, showing
a yellow grin. “Look at the hair on him. Longer than my big sister’s.”

 

“Oh, he’s one, all right,” the third soldier said. He affected to
sniff the air. “Nothing stinks like that but bushwhacker.”

 

The soldiers were close about him and his back was against
the bar.

 

“You still owe me a drink,” he said.

 

The sergeant grinned. “Oh, I owe you something all right, bushwhacker, but it’s not a drink.”

 

“I’ll wager it is,” said a man who pressed up behind the sergeant
and spoke over his shoulder. It was Coleman Younger. He grinned
and said, “Hello, Jim. Good to see you.”

 

The sergeant had lost his smile and stood fast, and Jim knew that
Cole was surreptitiously holding a pistol to the man. The other two
soldiers also stood wide-eyed, one of them with Frank James’ Colt in
his ribs, the other with Jesse’s Smith & Wesson hard against his
spine. Frank showed a small smile and nodded. Jesse was grinning
like a lunatic.

 

“Get the man his drink,” Cole said.

 

The sergeant shouted and waved hard for the barkeep’s attention
and signaled for a whiskey. When it came, Jim picked it up and
looked at it and then poured the drink in the sergeant’s shirt pocket.
He looked at Cole and the James boys and said, “Let’s get away from
the smell of these Union shitbags.”

 

Cole stripped the sergeant of his pistol. “You want this, come on
out and get it,” he said.

 

They swiftly snaked their way through the crowd and outside.
They went to their horses and swung up on the saddles and came
together in the middle of the street, reining their mounts in tight circles and all of them laughing. The wind had quit and their breath
plumed blue in the bright light of a high full moon.

 

“I swear you got some luck, Jimbo,” Cole said. “If we hadn’t
stopped in for a drink, those Yankee assholes might be dancing on
your head right now.”

 

“The door!” Frank said. The sergeant had come banging out
onto the gallery, and the shotgun in his hands had likely come from
behind the bar. It took him a moment to spot them and start to raise
the weapon—a moment too long. Jesse shot him in the mouth and he
staggered back against the door jamb and the shotgun fell and he
pitched forward on his face.