Wildwood Boys
A NOVEL
JAMES CARLOS BLAKE
For JoAnnaBlessed be the merciless, for they shall see
God’s enormous shrug.
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
—Flannery O’Connor, “On Her Own Work”
Contents
Epigraph
I
II
92
III
174
IV
255
V
312
About the Author
Credits
I
The Clan
6
1839–1862
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
much.”
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—
—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
around 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.
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.