Wildwood Boys (3 page)

Only in the company of young Bill and little Jim was Hayes
inclined to talk. The boys would go to his house and ask if he cared
to go fishing with them and he always did. They were usually accompanied by several dogs and Hayes was much amused by Bill’s supposed ability to converse with them. A yellow curdog named Quick
once sat and stared at Hayes intently and then turned to Bill and
wuffed low and the boy looked into its eyes for a moment before
making a gesture of dismissal and the dog trotted over to a shady
spot under a tree and settled itself with its muzzle on its paws.

“That yeller say something about me?” Hayes said, his expression both suspicious and amused.

Years of the Argonaut

 

“Well, sir,” Bill said, “he believes you’re about the saddest man
he ever saw.”

 

“Is that right?” Hayes said. He looked over at the dog and it cut
its eyes away without moving its head. “Well, truth be told, that son
of a bitch don’t look so all-fired jubilant to me neither.”

 

The boys laughed with him and the yellow dog raised its head
and itself appeared to smile.

 

He never spoke of his lost bride but talked mostly of the war, of
having seen the elephant, as the expression of the day had it. While
they sat on the creekbank and watched the stick floats bobbing on
their lines he told of the battle of Monterrey, of the boom and blast
of artillery and of house-to-house fighting and men shot and bayoneted and blown to portions. Told of screams and smells that might
have issued from hell’s own butcher shop, of blood running in the
cobbled streets. Three days the battle endured, and when it was done
he was one of the fortunates yet intact and without serious wound.
That night he and some of his fellows celebrated in a cantina. In his
joy at being alive he whooped and discharged a pistol into the ceiling
and the ball ricocheted off the iron brace of a viga and angled down
to strike the arm he rested on the dusky shoulders of a señorita and
shatter its humerus like a thing of glass. The surgeon had been
obliged to amputate at the shoulder. He said the missing limb sometimes itched him so bad he thought he might go insane for not being
able to scratch it. He still couldn’t stand the thought of his arm rotting in Mexican ground, and he regretted not bringing it back to
bury in America.

 

One day Hayes revealed to the boys a Colt revolver he’d stolen
from an ordnance wagon for no reason but conviction that the army
owed him something for his disfigurement. A huge thing more than
fifteen inches long and weighing close to five pounds fully charged
with .44-caliber conical balls, it was hardly less than a hand cannon.

 

“A Texas Ranger named Walker helped Colonel Colt to design
it,” Hayes told the boys. “It’ll blow the most of a man’s head off. If
you run out of rounds, why, you can bust a skull with it sure as
a hammer.”

 

He handed the piece to Bill. “I can’t work that loading lever with
just one arm,” Hayes said. “You might as well have it.” Bill cradled
it in both hands and marveled as if upon some holy object.

Another winter passed and now nothing would do for Jessup and Will
but to go to California and claim their share of gold. Martha argued
vehemently against the enterprise. She had made wide allowance for
Will’s inclination to horse theft but this ambition was too reckless for
her to accept without protest. Just because every fool and fool-killer in
the country was going to California was no reason for them to join the
parade. She asked what they knew about prospecting, asked Will how
she was supposed to manage the farm without him as well as care for
two-year-old Josephine and newborn Jenny. Will let her talk herself
tired and then said Hayes would stay on the place with her and
pointed out that Bill was almost of a size to do a man’s work and sixyear-old Jim was already tending to various main chores. She couldn’t
believe he was leaving her to care for a farm and five children and one
of them an infant and another not much more and nobody to help her
but a one-armed and half-distracted man devoted to the jug. But she
could see that her husband was decided, and so at last she only sighed
and said no more about it. Three weeks later Will and Jessup struck
out for the Santa Fe Trail and four years would pass without a word
from either.

Hayes proved surprisingly adept at working a variety of tools with
his single hand, and though he sipped from his jug all through the
day he seemed never to be drunk. Young Bill demonstrated his sufficiency to grown man’s work of every kind and Jim and Mary worked
hard as well and their mother never rested and the farm fared better
than any would have guessed. The cornfield throve and the pigs fattened properly. In season they harvested the corn and shocked the
stalks, put up yams and turnips and potatoes in the root cellar,
butchered hogs and smoked the meat. Evenings after supper the family came together on the porch for music and song. Uncle Hayes
delighted them all with his nimble stepdancing to the strains of Jim’s
harmonica and Bill’s Jew’s harp and Mary’s able thumping on a
washtub bottom.

Sometimes of a late afternoon Bill took the big Walker to the
creek to practice. When he shot a bird or squirrel the creature simply
vanished and nothing remained but scattered feathers or bits of
bloody pelt. He taught his little brother to shoot the Walker too,
though it was all young Jim could do to aim the piece with both
hands, and the recoil each time flung the gun high over his head
and usually threw him down. Their uncle regarded their shooting
with approval and took pulls from his jug and now and then told
them another story of the war. He told of men dying in greater numbers of fever than by enemy hand, of men so sick with the “blues”
they did shit themselves to death. The whole time he was in Mexico
there was no escaping the stink of human shit. He told of Mexican
coronets playing the no-quarter tune called “Degüello” all through
the night before the fight at Monterrey. Men stopped their ears with
plugs of tobacco to keep from hearing it another minute. “You never
heard nothing like that cutthroat music,” he said. “Freeze the hair in
your ass.”

Three years passed and half of a fourth. One cool autumn Sunday
Uncle Hayes went to the Black Owl by himself to sit under the
drooping willows and drink from his jug and skip stones across the
water. When they found him four hours later he was facedown on
the bottom of the creek in a depth of barely three feet. Young eels
swam through his early grayed hair wavering in the current. The
jagged bone jutting from below his elbow told the story: he’d fallen
in and broken the arm and been unable to push himself up to
breathe. Bill dug his grave in the shade of a cottonwood and Jim and
Mary fashioned a cross from two barked pieces of wood and his
mother read over the gravemound from the Psalms.

There came an early thaw that spring and the days warmed fast. On
a brightly blue May morning Jim Anderson saw a man mounted on
a sagging horse plodding across the meadow toward the house and
even before the rider drew close enough to make out his face he
thought he knew who it was. Now the dogs came aware of the
stranger and rose up out of the new grass in a clamoring rush and
Jim called them to come back but they ran on until Bill came out and
whistled them down. The pack came loping back with tongues
lolling and they sat before him and Bill told them with his eyes not to
bark at that man ever. They cocked their heads and he said, “It’s
Daddy is why.” The dogs resettled on the grass and watched the man
come on and none did yap at him again.

Bill called into the house and a moment later the family was
gathered on the porch and staring out at the approaching rider. A
low breeze was at his back and they caught his smell while he was
yet at a distance. He dismounted at the porch steps and the ruined
horse that was naught but hide and bone blew tremulously and Will
Anderson looked up at them all in turn with eyes blackly hollowed
by every sort of exhaustion. His clothes were torn and caked with
dirt and his own accumulated exudates, his boots held together with
wire, his hat absent its rear segment of brim.

Martha Anderson went down the steps and took him in her
arms. He hugged each of his children in turn and Bill saw that the
others’ eyes too went tearful with the reek of him. They did not
know that this hard smell was not entirely of the filth of his rags and
unwashed flesh but was also the very smell of rage, of festering anger,
a scent Bill and Jim Anderson would come to know well in men
other than their father in the years ahead.

“Jessup’s dead” were his first words. His voice raspy and unfamiliar. “Took sick on the Mokelumne placers two winters ago and
died in a fever.”

He scanned the area and Bill knew who he was looking for. “We
anyway never got us one bit of gold except for what we took from a
Chinaman’s teeth one time when he was drunk and Jessup lost that
at dicing the same night.” He turned to his wife and said, “If I ever
had a worse idea than going to California I can’t remember what it
was. Where’s Hayes?” And learned then that his only other brother
in the world was in his grave.

He spoke no more of California. He’d told the truth about not
acquiring even a speck of gold but for the Chinaman’s teeth, but he
never told of the bandits who fell on him and his brother in their
camp in their second year of working the placers. They shot Jessup
dead and would have killed Will too if he hadn’t jumped in the river
and been carried downstream to safety, although he barely escaped
drowning and then nearly died anyway of the ague he contracted
from the icy water. He did not tell of the long months of sickness and
then being penniless in San Francisco and turning in desperation to
the robber’s trade and being as often beaten and robbed himself as he
did beat and rob others. He joined with a pair of partners and
thought he’d struck it rich the night they robbed the counting room
of a gambling hall and got away with thousands of dollars. But when
they reined up at the outskirt of town to apportion the loot, one of
the partners shot the other dead off his horse and tried to shoot Will
too but only killed his mount from under him before making away
with all the money. Back at thieving and robbing on his own, he was
captured one night by a party of city vigilantes. He would have been
hanged but for a ship company’s need of work crews to put its vessels right for voyages round the Horn. The company was hard
pressed to find willing workers in that city of goldseekers and businessmen and grifters and thieves, but the owner had influence with
the vigilante committee and they would sometimes provide him with
criminal labor for a fee. And so Will was bound over to the ship
company to serve a sentence of eighteen months, and in that time he
toted and caulked and hammered and sawed and sanded and painted
while others in California sought for gold or robbed it from those
who’d found it. These things he never told.

Over the following days his talk was all of Kansas territory. On
his way back from California he had come on a fine tract of homestead land some hundred miles east of Missouri. It was set near
Agnes City, a few miles removed from the Santa Fe Trail, wellwooded and richly topsoiled and cut through by a swift creek. He
was decided they would move there. Martha could not refrain from
asking why. How much better could that portion of Kansas be than
the good bottom they had on the Black Owl? He said he just knew it
was better and would brook no further argument.

And so they removed to the Kansas tract Will had set his eye
upon. They built a dogtrot cabin and a stable, put up fences, planted
corn and raised pigs. And by the end of the year Will Anderson was
again at doing what he had in truth moved to Kansas to do—stealing
horses. This time with his sons at his side and learning the rustler’s
trade. California had convinced him for good and all that a man
ought to stay with doing what he could do best, and that bloodkin
was the only partnership for it.

Bleeding Kansas

The farm was as always good cover for the rustling, and by the
rustling they did prosper. In the same year the Andersons moved to
Kansas, the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed and new settlers were
pouring into the region. The increase in traffic along the Kansas portion of the Santa Fe Trail was the boon to horsethieving Will Anderson had thought it would be. By the time they had been in Kansas a
year, he was taking Bill and young Jim on late-night raids of waystation corrals and grazing pastures, sometimes of the local ranches that
provided horses to the stage and freight lines. They took as many as
two dozen head each time and moved them fast across the southern
backcountry along old stock traces and over isolated prairie and
along the Marais des Cygnes River and in a week had them in Bates
County, Missouri, and sold off to ready buyers who asked no questions except “How many?” and “How much?”

Every raid gave Bill Anderson a quivering thrill as they cut out
the horses and made away with them in a raise of dust. He loved the
look of their manes and tails lifting in the night wind, the sounds of
their deeply sonorous breathing and the drumming of their galloping
hooves. He delighted in their wonderful variety as they raced under
the stars—bays and duns and buckskins, blacks and claybanks, sorrels and paints, horses blazed and raindropped, skewbald and mottled and ass-spotted, all kinds. Every rustling made his blood jump
with the chance of being found out, with the possibility of violent
encounter. He laughed at the wild grin of his brother Jim, hardly
more than a child and already more seasoned to risk than most
grown men. They naturally took the very best of the animals for
their own, the fastest and boldest. Bill was proud of the big sable
stallion he named Edgar Allan, and Jim had taken for himself a
speedy Appaloosa he called Buck.

They were good at their work and were rarely discovered. In the
few instances when they were caught in the act and pursued, they
usually had only to fire a few rounds behind them and their chasers
would fall away, especially on hearing the blasts of Bill’s big Walker.
When the chasers proved brave and returned fire and continued to
come for them, they would let the horses go in one direction and
themselves veer off in another, racing into the darker cover of the
woodlands, galloping through the shadows of the river traces with
their hatbrims folded back in the wind and the cries and gunfire of
their hunters growing faint behind them until the only sounds they
heard were their own laughter and the clattering of their horses’
hooves.