Wildwood Boys (10 page)

The sun is at its meridian when one of the passing images fixes in
his head as suddenly and securely as the bobbling ball falls into a slot
on the turning roulette wheel. The vision is of Arthur Baker. Will
Anderson sets down his jug and stares hard at the trees beyond the
sunbright cornfield but he is seeing only Baker. But for Baker’s lies to
Mary she would not be in her misery. But for the injury to her heart,
his sons would not have set upon stealing Segur’s horses. But for that
rash rustling foray, Bill and Jim would not now be wanted men and
in peril of their lives, nor he himself feeling his world spun out of
control. . . .

The force of this besotted epiphany suffices to launch him from
his rocker and he totters for an instant at the earth’s wild reel
beneath him. Then steadies and grabs up the shotgun and lurches
down the steps and rushes staggering to the stable. Mary cries from
the window for him to come back. Jenny’s face is wide-eyed and gaping beside hers. Josephine bounds to the door, sensing in her soul
some vague but horrible misfortune to come from whatever manic
mission he is bent on, some catastrophe to befall them all unless he is
stopped right now. In her terror she raises the Walker in a two-hand
grip and puts the nub of the front sight on his distancing back and
cocks the piece. She hears her sisters shouting at her as she holds the
trembling gunsight on him and feels the trigger under her finger. And
then he is into the stable and she lowers the revolver and thumbs
down the hammer. Her sisters gape on her with horror—then rush to
her to hug her tight. They are clutching to each other as his horse
bursts from the stable with his heels in its flanks. He heads for
Baker’s house with shotgun in hand and no thought at all but that if
Segur is there he will kill him too.

Arthur Baker’s farm lies a mile north of his Santa Fe Trail store and
some dozen miles from the Anderson place. On this midday he is in
his upstairs den attending to some business papers, pausing now and
then to reflect on lovely Clara and his wedding to her just five days
hence. Now he hears a pounding of hooves drawing nearer and his
curiosity is piqued, for his farm is a placid place where even a galloping horse is a rare excitement. He goes to the window and sees a
rider trailing a plume of dust and coming hard down the road. A pair
of men digging postholes pause to stare after the horseman in the
risen haze. The rider turns off the road and onto the lane to the
house and Baker now recognizes Will Anderson and sees the shotgun
in his hand—sees him rein up almost directly below his window and
slide out of the saddle and lose his footing and go sprawling and one
of the shotgun’s barrels discharges its crunching load into the side of
the house and Baker feels himself flinch and his breath wedges in his
throat.

Will Anderson scrambles to his feet, snarling and cursing, and
lurches out of sight under the porch roof. Near to panic, Baker hastens to the guncase against the wall and takes up a singlebarrel shotgun and checks the load, which almost falls out of the breech for the
violent trembling of his hands. He steps into the hallway as a downstairs door crashes hard against a wall in a thunderous shatter of
glass. A high shriek from the housekeeper and low cursing from
Anderson. Baker’s legs tremulous as he waits at the top of the walled
and L-shaped stairway. Anderson’s maledictions louder, his boots
stomping on the lower leg of the stairs. He appears on the middle
landing with the shotgun at his waist and looks up and his red
clenched face loosens in surprise to see Baker standing there with his
own shotgun at the shoulder.

The walls jar with the blast of Baker’s weapon and the compact
load of buckshot enters Will Anderson at a point between the left
shoulder and the neck and breaks apart the clavicle and several
upper ribs and bores through the torso at an angle traversing an
assortment of organs including the heart and both lungs and bursts
out just above the right hip to splatter a thick mortal portion of him
over the wainscoting. Will in a spasm jerks the trigger of the other
barrel and detonates a fistsized hole through the landing wall and
then his shotgun clatters as he topples backward to sprawl headdown on the lower stairway, his eyes wide but forever done with seeing. Blood rolling from his gaping wounds and sopping his hair and
cascading down the steps to shape a bright gleaming pool on the
wooden floor. All amid the housekeeper’s continuing screams.

Riddances

Butch Berry sat his horse and kept hidden at the edge of the woods as
he regarded the Anderson house across the open patch of ground this
warm and cloudless midday. Smoke swirling from the kitchen chimney. Chickens pecking in the dirt and the pigs snortling in the wallow. Will’s rocker stood empty on the porch. Butch thought the elder
Anderson might be sleeping—or passed out, the way the man had
been drinking lately.

He had been riding hard all morning since departing the camp at
daybreak and had not yet eaten. He hoped the girls had something
tasty simmering in the cookpot. He chucked his horse forward and
out of the woods and rode up to the house.

He hallooed loudly and dismounted at the front porch and slung
the reins round a post. As he started up the steps two men came out
the door with cocked pistols pointed at him. Another showed himself at the window and held him in his riflesight. Butch Berry stood
fast.

One of the pistolmen ordered him to cross his arms and then
took his revolver off his belt and then reached down and removed his
bootknife as well. Voices rose up behind and he turned to see a group
of men gathered at the door of the barn and looking at him, all of
them armed with long guns and one with his pant leg cut open to the
knee and showing a bandage above his boot.

The man who’d disarmed him now prodded him into the house
with a pistol muzzle at his spine. In the center of the lamplit room a
body lay on planking set across sawhorses. It took Butch Berry a
moment to recognize the colorless waxen face as that of Will Anderson, who now bore but a vague resemblance to the living man. His
hair looked stiff and mudcaked and then Butch understood that the
crusting was dried blood.

The sisters were seated on the other side of the body and all three
staring at Butch—Jenny weeping softly and Mary redeyed and
drawn, Josephine tightlipped, her aspect more outraged than
bereaved. Moonfaced Sheriff Horner of Agnes City, a man of amiable and fair reputation, sat over coffee with two men at the table on
which lay Bill Anderson’s Walker Colt with a cord looped through
the trigger guard. One man lean and grayly mustached. The other
Arthur Baker, whose eyes could not hide his fear.

The lean man pushed an empty chair out from the table with his
foot. “Sit,” he said. “We got a proposition for the Anderson boys.
You and your brother too. Hear it out careful and then take it to
them.”

By sundown he was back at the camp. As soon as they saw his face
the Anderson brothers knew the tiding was bad.

The news of their father’s death stunned them all the more for
Arthur Baker being the instrument of it. That clumsyfoot fop of a
storekeeper.

“Sheriff Horner’s calling it self-defense plain and simple,” Butch
Berry said.

 

Bill Anderson poked at the fire with a stick, his face a wavering
red mask in the firelight, his brother Jim’s the same.

 

“I guess I know what you boys are thinking,” Ike Berry said. “It’s
only natural. For a fact, me and Butch didn’t let them sonofabitches
slide who cut up our daddy. But this is different. They got your sisters there. They got your daddy who needs burying.”

 

Jim Anderson spat into the fire.

 

“Ike’s telling you right,” Butch Berry said. His wayward eye
seemed more pronounced in the firelight.

 

The Andersons exchanged a look in which each recognized in the
other’s eyes how much the world was changed by the fact of their
father’s removal from it. And in that look they pledged to set the
matter right in its proper time.

 

They sent Butch back that evening with acceptance of Segur’s
offer—backed by Sheriff Horner’s assurance—of their safe passage
to come home and bury their father and then go away to Missouri
with their sisters and whatever belongings they cared to take with
them. The rustling warrants on them would be put aside. In exchange,
the Andersons agreed never to return to Kansas. As the Berry boys
were now known members of the rustling party, they too had to
swear they would keep out of Kansas henceforth.

Butch was on the porch the next morning with the Anderson girls,
the sheriff and Segur when Bill and Jim appeared out of the woods
and rode up to the house. Arthur Baker was in the barn with several
of his armed men about him and would not show his face throughout the proceedings.

The Anderson family’s two wagons—one covered and one not—
stood before the house, each already hitched to its brace of mules
and bearing what possessions the sisters had selected to keep, and so
the remaining business did not take long. There was little talk
beyond the girls’ weepy greetings as they embraced their brothers.
Bill informed the sheriff that he would not dishonor his father by
burying him in Kansas but would take the body back to Missouri.

The sheriff squinted at this news and took a quick look back into
the house where the body yet lay on the planking. “It’s a long ways
to Missouri and he’s already dead two days.”

Bill Anderson looked at him without expression. The sheriff
shrugged. “Hell, he’s

On the lone prairie
your
father.”

 

The Anderson brothers rolled the body in a blanket and tightly
tied off the ends of the shroud and carried the corpse to the wagon in
which Josephine sat and they laid it on the open bed. Josie leaned
down to whisper in Bill’s ear, then Bill looked at Segur on the porch
and said, “I’ll have that pistol you spirited out of the house.”

 

Segur stood with his thumbs hooked in his belt and regarded Bill
without expression. Sheriff Horner cleared his throat loudly and spat
off the porch. Segur glanced at him, then shrugged and stepped
down and went to his horse. He probed in the wallet behind the cantle and withdrew the big Walker and handed it to Bill who passed it
up to Josephine. She checked to see that all the chambers were
charged and then held the piece in both hands with the muzzle skyward and looked to the barn and said, “Sheriff, why don’t you call
that Baker fella to step up to the door there a minute?”

 

The sheriff’s mouth and Segur’s too came ajar. She showed Bill a
quick grin and then laid the pistol beside her. He chuckled and got
into the wagon and took up the reins and slapped them over the
mules’ haunches and the wagon lurched into motion with loud
creakings and clatter. Jim brought the covered wagon up behind,
Mary and Jenny seated beside him, and the Berry boys followed on
their mounts and with the Anderson horses on lead ropes.

 

“Where’s the dogs?” Bill said low to Josephine.

 

“Raven got hold of one of them sonofabitches by the leg and
wouldn’t let go till they shot him,” Josephine said. “They shot
Mariner too. I guess they shot them all.”

 

The Segur men watched them go by. In the first moments the
only sounds were the rattlings of the wagons and the falling of
hooves. Then someone hollered, “And
stay
gone, you goddamn
pukes!”

 

Much guffawing and epithets and curses, a chorus of derision
raining on the Anderson party as their wagons headed for the woodland trace. The brothers Anderson and Berry bit hard on their fury
and kept their eyes ahead, refusing to give any show of insult or even
of hearing. Mary and Jenny sat close together and admonished each
other to be brave.

 

Only Josephine would not endure their taunts. She turned
around on the wagonseat and yelled, “Everybody knows there’s
three kinds of suns in Kansas—sunshine, sunflowers and sons of
bitches—and none of you look like a sunbeam or a blossom to me!”

 

A few of the men laughed at her spunk, but most were enraged
by the profane mouth on this slip of a girl and they came back at her
with a torrent of the rawest cursing. One man flung a stone and it
came near its mark, whacking on the inner side of a wagonboard and
ricocheting against the shrouded body of Will Anderson. Josie clambered into the bed and grabbed up the rock and flung it back with
fine form, scattering the bunch of them like spooked birds.

 

“Jesus! Little bitch can
throw
!”

 

Some of them started hustling after more stones, but from the
porch Sheriff Horner hollered, “No rockfighting, goddammit!” The
men said “Ah sheriff” and grudgingly lobbed their rocks aside.

 

As the wagon turned onto the trace, Josephine stood swaying in
the jolting bed and bellowed, “
Shitheads!
Kansas
shit-heaaads
!”

 

Then their wagon was around the bend and behind the trees and
Bill said, “All right, girl—hush up and sit down before you fall and
bust your ass. I guess you told them.”

 

She settled back onto the seat and snuggled against him and held
his arm tightly with both of hers. “I know you just want to be sure
me and Mary and Jenny are safe someplace before you and Jimmy
come back here and kill that Baker son of a bitch,” she said, this
Josephine Anderson who was fourteen years old.

 

“Listen to
you
—such a young girl talking about killing.”

 

“I can’t help it I’m a girl, and killing is just exactly what he’s got
coming. And I’m not
that
young.”

 

He looked at her sidewise and smiled.

 

“We’re not done with Baker, are we, Billy?”

 

“
We
? Well,
we
gave our word not to come back to Kansas.”

 

“Don’t shine me, Billy Anderson. I know as good as you a man’s
word only holds when he gives it to a man worth having it.”