Woe to Live On: A Novel (17 page)

“Wait!” Sue Lee said. “Wait a minute, Jake. I want to look at him.”

She knelt next to the grave, leaned over and kissed Jack Bull’s blue lips.

This act of hers moved me. I went into prayer position at her side. Many things hidden in me were being hinted out, and I stared down at Jack Bull Chiles and dredged up all the farewell feelings I had. I bent over. I did something to him dead I had never tried on him alive. I kissed him good-bye, right where she had, just the same.

Holt humphed behind me. I looked up at him, and he watched me oddly.

“Did you see something that bothers you, Holt?”

His face was smooth, and he shook his head briskly.

“No, no,” he said and turned away. “I didn’t see it.”

I finished the funeral. The grave made a mound. No good verses came to mind, so it was a stoic ceremony.

“So long,” I said. “See you over the river.”

Outside it was gray. A late March storm was coming in from the north. The clouds looked soiled and the light was dull.

“Let’s get to Captain Perdee’s,” I said. “We’ll rally with the boys. It’s time to start the war back up.”

I claimed two of Jack Bull’s four pistols and gave the others to Holt. We hung them from our saddles and put the widow on top of Jack Bull’s horse.

I wanted to be moving and never in that dugout again.

“Keep an eye out for George,” I said.

“I am,” Holt answered. “But I bet he at Perdee’s.”

We kept to the timber. The day got colder, then it pitched snow at us. The wind shoved the flakes into our faces but we hunched over and rode on. By midday Sue Lee had surrendered to fatigue. Holt and me took a rope and tied her into the saddle. She uttered neither complaints nor praise. She was past that.

The horses sent plumes of breath from their nostrils and slogged through the snow. Some inches of the white stuff had gathered on the ground. The wind blew our tracks away as quick as we made them. No Federals crossed our path. If you weren’t desperate, you wouldn’t be out in such weather. I steered us toward Captain Perdee’s, where I hoped we would find plenty of comrades. Sue Lee would be sent to
some safer southern haven. Me and Holt would fight another season. The deeds of winter demanded it.

I kept us rolling beyond nightfall, and the snow kept blowing and nothing much could be seen. We lumbered along blindly in the woods and did not speak.

Around midnight we came upon a burned house. Some weak citizen had lost all here. Two walls still stood and we took cover, huddling next to them.

I wrapped Sue Lee’s blanket around her and she slept. My body bid me join her. She shivered in sleep, so I spread my blanket over us both and lay against her. This warmed us but, tired as I was, I could not sleep.

So I listened to her breathe. The girl was good as double widowed and only seventeen. She’d seen a mirror of hell, I guess. Her breaths had a ragged rhythm. A bad sleep cadence. But her body was warm.

It was good to know her.

Curling up to her was a saving human exercise, as it reminded me that I lived, and diverted me from recollections of all I had lost, which was all there was.

Many cry in trouble and are not heard, but to their salvation.

—S
T
. A
UGUSTINE

A
LL THAT YEAR
we were dying. The hairbreadth instinct some call luck had slowed on us. They killed us in groups and pairs and alone. We fell in timber, haylofts, fighting on the field and lying wounded helpless in borrowed beds.

Oh, we hit back.

Within sight of Kansas City twenty-eight Federals hauling grain made our acquaintance. They knew we rode under the Black Flag, so they fought to the end. Our reputation for thoroughness gave the Federals a kind of forlorn ferocity. “They know prisoners are not our style,” George Clyde said. This was true wherever we fought, and it was true of us when the upper hand was theirs.

When we all rallied at Captain Perdee’s in late March it was clear by the jumpy look in previously calm faces, the despondent gaze in unblinking eyes, that our struggle had carried us into a new territory of the soul, where we found new versions of our selves.

Cave Wyatt, Riley Crawford, the Hudspeths, Turner Rawls and Black John welcomed us all. There was much backslapping
and sharing of tales, which led to sadness or guffaws. Several southern men would ride with us no more, but we didn’t dwell on that.

Sue Lee Shelley was not the only female refugee in camp. The Federals had gotten in the habit of arresting our women, so we had a gaggle of wives and sisters and sweethearts in our midst. We convoyed them to the Perche Hills and left them there among the hidden patriots of that district.

By summer the most common comments were those that roughly compared Lawrence, Kansas, to Hades. The Jayhawkers operated from that place and operated meanly. Few lives in western Missouri went untouched by their depradations.

“Lawrence must be reduced to rubble,” Black John said. Various echoes of this sentiment were heard, and we began to ponder a visit there.

In July, a hot terrible month, me, Holt, Riley Crawford and Turner Rawls were riding near Bone Hill, scouting for a Unionist who called himself Major Grubbs. The citizens thereabouts had complained of him and his boastful treacheries, so we set off to counsel him toward a more humble attitude.

“I want to kill him,” Riley said. Riley’s boyish face held eyes as hard as any demon’s. The boy had been weaned from hope, and only bloodshed raised his morale. “I want to kill them all. Anymore that’s all I think about.”

We followed a slight creek, our mounts splashing in the shallows. Whiskey was in it with us. Lately it was always in us. It made the world seem slower, more possible to defeat. This was a necessary delusion.

Within sight of Bone Hill, a clapboard village, we accosted a farmer driving hogs down a lane with a stick and two dogs. He was nervous in our presence and got more so when Turner put a pistol at his head and demanded, “Whar dis Mador Groobs?”

“What?” the farmer said. The hogs grunted off and about with the dogs yapping after them. “What did you say?”

“Where does Major Grubbs stay?” I asked.

“Oh,” the farmer said. I could see the tendency toward slyness in the skittering of his eyes. “You boys don’t want him. He’s a dangerous fellow. You just leave him be.”

Turner, who knew his own mind, shot the farmer in the foot.

“Sown bits!” he shouted. “Whar dis Groobs?”

“Over east!” the farmer howled. He landed on his butt and held his boot full of rearranged toes. “He stays at the Dorris place! It’s on a hill with apple trees, God damn you.” There was true fright in him now. “You boys didn’t need to shoot me.”

“Shut your damned mouth,” I told him. “And don’t you go raise the alarm or we’ll find you and roast your mother in front of you.”

On down the lane we went, sharing the rotgut, woozily certain of victory. The lane led us up a small rise and past a rock wall that ran in front of a charred house. We were noisy. Turner had fired a shot. We were two steps into drunk.

At the rock wall they opened up on us. Even drunk I understood that we had blundered, and wheeled Old Fog about, swinging loosely in the saddle. There were twenty or
more of them, all mounted and miserable, and it seemed to me they gloated.

“Oh, shit!” I said. “It’s Jayhawkers!”

No debate was required over our course of action—we fled.

They chased. Bullets zinged by or chimed off rock or plumed blood from a horse’s ass. We shot back while fleeing, an exercise we had gotten pretty good at.

The retreat took us back to the farmer and the hogs and the dogs. He was doing a hobbled variant of the sprint, and I guessed he had known Jayhawkers were in the area. Holt sized things the same and called the farmer a son of a bitch, then shot him down right in the midst of the squealing hogs and yapping dogs.

“Kill the secesh!” the Jayhawkers shouted. Their attitude was one of mean confidence, and they had a right to it. They loved murdering us in small, safe clusters.

We hadn’t got far when Riley caught one in the soft area below the ribs. It went from back to front. The ball split that loose flesh wide. It made an instant mess of him, but he clung to the saddle horn.

Holt and me spun around and took aim. This caused them to pull up a bit, and we blasted away at them, hoping only to stall them long enough for Riley to clear out. But they were too many, so we rejoined the flight.

They thundered after us, saying terrible things and winging shots at us. Old Fog was creased in the haunches and bolted ahead in a horsey panic. Down to the south, beyond a long meadow, the timber was thick.

“Get to timber,” Holt said, saucer-eyed. “Get to timber.”

Hell, we took off that way, but the Jayhawkers hung tough and little Riley had his hands full. We couldn’t pull ahead of them. At the timberline Turner and Holt and me faced them and displayed enough good aim to send them down the meadow, where they could enter the timber and hunt us.

“I can’t ride,” Riley said. Wrong parts of him hung over his belt. He wasn’t even sixteen and he was ruined. “Put me down, please. Please. Please, put me down.”

Dark wasn’t coming on fast enough to help us. We had to keep running. That is one thing bushwhackers know. The thick green leaves shielded us for the moment, but right away we could hear the Jayhawkers trotting into the timber a short distance away.

“Please, please,” went Riley.

I stepped down and pulled the ripped-wide boy off his mount and set him against a tree. He held his hands where he was spilling, and that pale thing that happens to the mortally wounded was happening to him.

“Leave me my guns,” he said. “Don’t take ’em. Leave ’em.” Riley was a kid like no kid I ever knew. “I might get one.”

I cocked a pistol and laid it near him. Turner was grunting some fierce riddle and Holt was prancing about. We had to go.

“Riley,” I said. I put my palm to his face and squeezed his cheek. “You got to fire at them, Riley. Bring them down on you.”

“I will, Jake. Boys, I will.” He was crying, and rippling with pain. “I was a good boy, wasn’t I?”

“As good as they come,” I said, and remounted.

We took off. I looked back once and saw Riley hunched to the tree, his face to the sky.

A sneak through the woods was our plan. It is a hard trick to bring off on horseback. Noise was made. The Jayhawkers were shouting commands to fan out and flush us. Pretty quick after that Riley’s shots sounded. That was our notice to lay on the spurs and we did it.

In a minute there were more shots, then silence.

“Tough boy,” Holt said. “But he didn’t hold them long.”

Even as he spoke I heard hooves beating the earth, branches cracking and dangerous voices. We were in a low spot, thick with bramble, that ran between two rises. A gully twisted down toward the south.

“Follow this gully,” I said. “If we got to, we’ll break their line.”

Turner led. Flinches had come to roost on his face, and the whole gamut of his features bobbled. Holt took up the rear, and in the undertones of his breath I believe I caught a snatch of a hymn.

Before we’d gone two hundred feet I saw two men on the rise to the east. I hoped to kill them before they saw us, and then they did see us, and I think they had had the same idea in store for us, so both opinions were disappointed.

Everybody looked for a tree to hide behind.

“Oh, Lor’!” Turner cried. “Dey’s god us.”

“We’ll break through,” I said. All the horses were jittery and jerking around, but fighting on foot was for morons. “Let’s do it now. Attack those two now, it’s our only chance.”

Fright may have been our regular pastime, but hesitancy was not a bushwhacker trait. We tore right into them, and they plowed downhill to meet us. Clean shots were hard because of the trees, and bark flew hither and yon, and we trilled rebel yells for all we were worth, and you had better believe that we could raise a cry that would have you filling your boots.

When we closed on them, between two spacious, fat oaks, the shots were so rapid as to be mesmerizing. One of the Jayhawkers had a red feather in his hat and a rotten face. He aimed on Holt but I got him. I busted him open at the neck and the teat and he fell a corpse.

His comrade lost heart on seeing this and retreated, calling wildly for help.

We then did a tactical move that consisted entirely of running away.

After a quarter mile of panicked scrambling, we came to a clearing and just about flew across it. I looked over my shoulders and, oh, shit, yes, there they were, coming on after us.

The horses we rode were as fine a breed of beasts as there has ever been. They had bottom and sand and some vague beasty knowledge that we required all of it right then. We ran them hard all afternoon, and the Jayhawkers fell back but stayed in sight until dark.