Wildwood Boys Read online

  Wildwood Boys

  A NOVEL

  JAMES CARLOS BLAKE

  For JoAnna

  Blessed be the merciless, for they shall see God’s enormous shrug.

  —George Garrett, Entered from the Sun

  The man in the violent situation reveals those qualities least dispensable to his personality, those qualities which are all he will have to take into eternity with him….

  —Flannery O’Connor, “On Her Own Work”

  Contents

  Epigraph

  I

  The Clan

  II

  The Company

  III

  The Captains

  IV

  The Camps

  V

  The Casualties

  About the Author

  Praise

  Other Books by James Carlos Blake

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  I

  The Clan

  1839–1862

  SAINT LOUIS DAYS

  Will Anderson had always felt that life should own more excitement than a farm could ever afford. He’d begun to resent farming from the time he was old enough to be charged with the morning milking, and by the time he was steering a plow he abhorred the yeoman’s life. His brothers laughed whenever they heard him cursing in his struggles to harness a recalcitrant mule, and they told him he’d best get used to it. It was not that he was averse to hard work but that he was possessed of a romantic disposition. As he grew toward early manhood he labored the days long and then lay awake nights and pondered possibilities until he fell asleep with fatigue. He thought the city might be the thing, though he knew little of cities except that they were not farms.

  He was not yet eighteen the night he forsook his Kentucky home. He made directly for the neighboring farm of the prosperous Kiner family and sneaked through shadows blinking with fireflies and up to the house past dogs that knew his scent. At Martha’s window he hissed her awake and asked her to go with him and be married and live in Saint Louis. She was a shy but comely girl who generally preferred the company of books to social entertainments, but one day she’d accompanied her sisters to a county fair and was introduced to Will Anderson, and they’d neither one had eyes for any other since. Her father had repeatedly told her she was pretty enough to make an advantageous marriage and that the Andersons were hardly removed from hardscrabble, but like Will himself she was of a nature more fanciful than practical, and she knew in her heart that no greater excitement would ever come her way than this young man at her window.

  They made off in the bright haze of a gibbous April moon, giggling like children, mounted double on the big mule he’d stolen from his father, though he did not see it as stealing but as compensation due him for all the young years of labor he’d given to the farm. He would not, however, take any of her father’s animals without permission. They carried few clothes and one blanket, a coffeepot, a fry pan, a small bag of books, and the zither she would not abandon and bore slung upon her back.

  “Damn, girl,” he whispered as they made away, “I guess I ought’ve took Daddy’s wagon too, just to tote all your goods. This poor mule ain’t never carried such a load.”

  She hit him on the back with her fist and said, “It’s not that much.”

  They took as well the small dowry her father had been putting aside toward the gainful marriage he envisioned for her, and which money she knew to be cached under a flat stone in the springhouse. Will had yielded to her reasoning that it was their proper due. “You’re the husband I choose,” she’d whispered. “It’s yours by all justice of the heart.” She was a reader of poetry, this Martha Kiner. He’d had to grin as he said, “All right, then.”

  They were wed in Hickman, then ferried over the Mississippi and followed the river road to Saint Louis. They took lodging in a boardinghouse. She wrote to her parents to explain how deeply she loved this young Anderson who set her heart to dancing every time she looked on him. In return came a brief note from her father: “You ever come back here I’ll whip you to the assbone. He comes back I’ll feed him to the hogs.”

  Though Martha assured him her father would not come looking for her, he thought it prudent for them to change addresses and take another name for a time—Jackson, like Old Hickory, whom he’d long admired. She nevermore wrote to nor heard from any bloodkin but her elder sister Sally, who also lived in Missouri but far off on its western border. Sally had married a stage driver named Angus Parchman six years earlier and gone with him to work a farm he’d inherited in Jackson County. But not even her sister would Martha ever see again.

  He thought he should learn a city man’s trade and so took a position as apprentice in a hatter’s shop. But he soon came to detest Saint Louis for its crowded sidewalks and bullying policemen, its ceaseless clamor of wagon traffic and steamboat whistles and bellowing humanity, its multitude of alien stinks. Even the smell of horseshit seemed somehow foul to him when it came off Saint Louis streets. But most of all he hated the city’s incipient population of foreigners, in particular its Germans.

  “There wasn’t near as many Dutchmen yet in that town as you got today,” he would later tell his sons, “but there was already enough so you couldn’t help but run into some of them every time you stepped out in the street. Couldn’t help but hear them neither. It was ‘Dutchland this’ and ‘Dutchland that’ everywhere you turned your ear. What galled me the most was them all the time saying the U S of A is a backward country because some of the states got slavery, saying Missouri ought be ashamed of itself for being one of them. Bunch of damn foreigners—squareheads—calling us backward and right in our own country! I tell ye, boys, a man can get his fill of such talk pretty damn quick. Goddam Dutchmen. It was in Saint Louis I first heard it said the Dutch are like farts because they most of them loud, they ain’t about to go back where they came from, and loud or quiet they every one of them stinks to high heaven. Gateway to the West, my sorry ass!—Saint Louis is the Gateway from Dutchland is what it is. I seen it happening way back then.”

  His bitterness toward the city’s ways and foreigners was made worse by his day-long confinements in the hattery. He rarely saw the sun. The shop reeked of solutions used in constructing the hats and he began to suffer chronic headaches. His muscles ached for proper use. One day a man who worked at the table next to his and had been employed in the shop for more than a year—an amiable fellow, but increasingly given to tics and soft mutterings as he worked—went crazy in his own home. He refused to get out of bed one morning, and when his wife asked what he thought he was doing and why he wasn’t getting ready to go to the shop, he simply and mutely stared at her. Frustrated to anger, she grabbed him by his sleepshirt and tried to pull him bodily from the bed. He in turn grabbed her by the neck with both hands and throttled her. The whole episode witnessed by their spinster daughter who ran shrieking from the house to cry murder in the streets.

  Will Anderson read all about it in the newspaper. According to the report, lunacy was not uncommon among hatters and was thought to be inspired by prolonged exposure to the chemicals of the trade. Will had now been at hatmaking for several months and this revelation explained everything to him about his headaches—and it put him in a rage. This damned Saint Louis! That damned hat factory!

  The following morning he stalked into the manager’s office and closed the door behind him. He announced he was quitting and demanded the pay he was due. The manager was an Acadian come to Saint Louis to make his fortune, but he bore no love for Missourians and believed Will to be one. He said workers were paid for a full week’s labor only and Will would have to finish out the week if he expected any wages.

  Will knew the man kept money in his desk and he stepped aroun
d to search for it and extract what was rightfully his. When the manager roughly shoved him back and said, “Get out from here, Jackson—you damned puke!” his only thought was to put a quick end to it before the man made outcry. He snatched up a heavy iron desk ornament in the form of a rearing horse and crowned him with it. The manager’s eyes rolled up as if he would inspect the damage from inside his skull and he fell with the inimitable languor of the dead.

  Will’s heart was thrashing in its cage as he stared at the bloodstain blooming darkly on the carpet under the man’s broken head. But his apprehension quickly gave way to righteous anger—the man had tried to cheat him, after all. He hurriedly searched the desk and found more than fifty dollars in paper and specie and stuffed the money in his pockets. Then went to the door and paused there to ease his breathing. Then opened it and turned to call back into the room, “All right, then, Mr. DuBois, I’ll fetch that catalog from the mercantile directly, sir.” Some of the hatters looked up from their blocks and molds with the barest curiosity, then gave themselves back to their work. Will shut the door and left the shop. An hour later he and Martha were clear of Saint Louis and bound back to the farming life.

  TRUE CALLING

  He told Martha he’d been obliged to take his rightful pay from DuBois by force and so thought it wise if they now called themselves Tyler, just in case the law should come searching for him with a trumped-up warrant or some such. She regarded him with narrowed eyes but asked no questions.

  They homesteaded in Marion County and raised corn and swine. A clearwater stream wound through a copse of cottonwoods in the swale below their cabin and the deer that watered there provided plentiful fresh meat. He tried his hand at muletrading in the nearby hamlets but proved no match for the sharps. He sadly confronted the possibility that a farmer was all he was or ever would be.

  Martha was rosy in her first pregnancy now, and as he came in from the field at sundown he would hear her singing to young Bill forming up in her belly for entry to the world. She played her zither after supper. He smiled on her contentment and held her close in the night, embraced the easy rise and fall of her breathing, felt the steady beat of her heart in her breast. And yet he yearned for something more—not for more money or goods or property, but for a life less ordinary, for an excitement he couldn’t give name to.

  One Saturday he delivered a wagonload of pigs to the Palmyra market and then took his ease in a tavern with three men of recent acquaintance. In the course of their convivial drinking, he learned they were all in agreement with him that farming was dull use of a man’s life. Among them was a graybeard named Sutpen who now leaned forward on his elbows and asked Will if he was interested in going with them to Iron County to retrieve some horses. Will asked whose horses they were, and the man smiled and said there was some question about that but they intended to resolve it. Will looked from one grinning man to another and said, “I see.” He sipped his whiskey and gave the matter regard. The risk and hazard of the proposal sped his blood. Risk and hazard, yes. He filled the cups around and said, “You boys count me in.” And thus discovered his true calling of horse thief.

  They never rustled more often than once every two months, and sometimes three months would pass between forays. They usually rode in the dark of a new moon, they never stole in their own county, they never raided the same county twice within the same year, no matter how rich the region’s pickings. They never took but a portion of a herd, rarely more than two dozen head at a time, the better to contain the animals as they galloped them back to Marion County. Because Will’s place was the most isolate they always took the horses there and corralled them in a clearing a good mile deep into a hickory grove behind his house. They would rework the brands and sell the animals singly or in pairs to various neighbors and acquaintances whose love of a bargain outweighed whatever vague suspicions they did entertain. Sometimes a dealer would buy the whole lot, asking only the direction it would be wisest to take the horses for resale and tipping his hat with a wink when they pointed the way opposite from the horses’ origin.

  To let even part of his small acreage go fallow or to quit raising pigs might have roused speculation about his means of livelihood—musings that might reach ranchers of adjoining counties who had lost horses, that might pique the curiosity of agents of the law—and so Will Anderson, known as Tyler in Marion County, continued to work his farm even though he could have supported his family on the proceeds of the horse deals. His partners did the same.

  THE FAMILY

  Martha was at first sorely vexed to learn of the new risk he had introduced to their lives but she soon enough struck a truce with this circumstance she could not have altered by any rhetoric. She had anyway always known that life with Will Anderson, long or short, would be venturesome, had known it since the night of their elopement from Kentucky. She conceded that the man was but following his nature and no good could come of her resistance to it.

  For his part, he no longer resented farm life so utterly, now that his family’s keep did not depend on it and its tedium was relieved by the rustlings. Now he knew contentment to sit in his rocker of a warm evening, smoking his pipe and hearing the strings of Martha’s zither and watching baby Bill—christened William T.—crawl about the porch trying to catch fireflies with his hands, the child’s eyes remarkable for their bright and ceaseless curiosity as well as their rare coloring, the hazel irises rimmed by a thin band of bright blue.

  In years to come Will would on various occasions tell his firstborn son the story of his birth on the coldest day in local memory, the second of February, 18 and 40, a Sunday. “A regular winter day just all of damn sudden went about four times colder,” Will Anderson would say. “Birds fell out of the sky froze solid as rock. Wasn’t much snow but there blew a norther to tear the hide off a goat. Lord, the wind! The roof sounded like it was in pain. There was frost all on the inside walls. We had the fireplace booming and still we were freezing. You were blue as a virgin’s vein and not yet a day old but you never made a sound, just squinched up your face and seen the thing through. I knew then you were a hardcase and I told your ma so. When the wind finally let up, it sounded like war the way the trees were popping. I stepped outside and the first breath of that cold air was like getting hit across the nose with a scantling. The wind had pulled a door off the barn and the cow for some dumb-ass cow reason wandered out to the trace and just stood there and froze to death on its feet. I couldn’t so much as put a nick in her hide with my bowie. Tried to quarter her with an ax but it was like hacking at an oak stump. Had to build a fire under her to thaw her sufficient to chop her up bit by bit. Talk about cold! Was that way for six days before it got usual winter again.”

  A year after Bill was born came Robert, who in his fifth month was carried away by some nameless disease. Then came Tommy, who at age two and with a stick provoked a huge colony of ground wasps that enclad his head like a snarling yellow hood and stung his hands and scalp and every exposed portion of him including his eyeballs and the tongue of his open shrieking mouth and he died even as little Bill and his pregnant mother came running to flail at the yellowjackets and carry the boy away to the house. The head and hands of the small corpse his father buried under an elm were bloated and darkly purple.

  Martha next delivered Jim and she and Will smiled to see four-year-old Billy keeping watch over his baby brother and instructing him in the names of things in the world. When Mary was born the following year Will Anderson held her as though she were made of the rarest glass and Martha beamed at his happiness in a daughter. Then came Josephine, then Jenny the last, and all three sisters would come to dote on Bill and Jim and feel both pride and rue in the knowledge that none of them would ever meet a man the equal of their brothers.

  Bill grew up a child of nature, observing intently its ways and creatures, the wind and clouds, the currents and moods of rivers. He taught himself stealth and moved through the brush like shadow. He learned to shoot at a young age and was a deadeye natur
alborn. What he did not teach himself about horses he learned from his father. And all that he came to learn and know he taught to his brother as well.

  He made claim from boyhood to understand the thoughts of dogs and to be able to talk with them through mind language, although he sometimes spoke to them aloud, if only because some things—reprimands, for example, and jokes—were simply of better effect when heard with the ears and not just the mind. At first his father had wondered if Bill was touched. But the boy seemed sensible enough in all other ways and the elder Anderson had anyhow encountered enough lunacy in his life to know a serious case from a harmless one. Still, he couldn’t help but shake his head each time he saw Bill sitting eye to eye with one or another of their hounds and nodding and smiling as the dog worked its ears and brow and now and then wuffed low and showed a broad grin.

  Martha’s love of books did not slacken over the years, and their house held an uncommon lot of volumes for that part of the world. She taught the children early to read and to letter. Their basic texts were the Old Testament and the first through the fourth of McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers, but their readings included as well Sarah Josepha Hale’s Poems for Our Children, Washington Irving’s Sketch Book, and the aphoristic wisdoms of Poor Richard’s Almanack. As they got older they graduated to Shakespeare’s sonnets, the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and the works of a more recent writer named E. A. Poe, whose macabre and melodious poetry Bill Anderson thought wondrous. His mother frowned on Poe’s morbid cast of mind and claimed to regret having bought the books at even the bargain price of five cents each.