Wildwood Boys (37 page)

Mortal dramas were playing out on every street. Women interposing themselves between their men and the men who would kill
them, pleading with the guerrillas, arguing, trying to bargain, even
cajoling them in their efforts to save their men’s lives. In some few
cases they would succeed, in most not.

They came to a street where three guerrillas were crowfooting
around a shrilling woman trying desperately to protect a man from
them with her body, holding him tightly to her as a mother hugs a
frightened child, whirling with him this way and that in her efforts to
keep her back to all their guns at once.

“Please,”
she begged, “have pity!”

The bushwhackers laughed. “We are fiends from hell, woman,”
one said. “There is no pity today.”

 

Bill rode past them and seconds later heard the gunshots behind
him and the woman’s wail of grief rising to mingle with so many others. And in that moment was aware of the ache in his jaws, so tightly
were they clenched.

The saloons were the first places many of them had hied. They’d
cleared off the shelves and then rolled whiskey barrels out to the
sidewalks and stood them in upright rows and smashed away the
tops so a man could dip himself a schoonerful without even having
to dismount.

Larkin Skaggs galloped ahead of the bunch in his haste to get at
the nearest row of sidewalk liquor, the shredded Union flag still dragging behind his horse. He was already on his second mugful of
whiskey when Bill and the others reined up and stepped down from
their horses. Mugs were passed to them and they each dipped a
drink. The surrounding din was incessant—the gunfire and rebel
yells and bushwhacker laughter, the screams of fear and pain and
sorrow.

“Sweet baby Jesus,” Ike Berry said, glancing up and down the
street. “I never even dreamt the like.” His look was troubled.

 

Bill Anderson was surprised by his sudden irritation at Ike’s
remark. Then he saw the look on his brother’s face and snapped,
“What are
you
so hangdog about?”

 

“I ain’t,” he said. Then shrugged. “It’s just, I don’t know. I
guess ...I wish there was more
soldiers
to fight, I don’t know.” He
looked off across the street.

 

“If at least these people were Dutchmen,” Ike said. “Daddy used
to say the damned Dutch always got it coming, no matter they fight
back or not.”

 

Butch Berry stood apart from them, his necklace of ears holding
three raw additions he’d taken at the Federal camp. He was watching a drunken bushwhacker trying to make his horse stomp on a hatless man with a bloody head who was struggling to drag himself off
the street. He spat.

 

Bill stalked into the saloon and snatched a nearly full bottle from
a bushwhacker so drunk he didn’t even object, then commandeered a
table at the back of the room. A minute later Jim and the Berrys
came in with refilled mugs and sat with him. They drank in silence
and none looked into the eyes of another.

 

He knew now what was chafing him. He’d heard its timbre in
Ike’s remark and seen its shadow in his brother’s face. He’d been
quick to volunteer his men for the attack on the army camps in town
because he was set on killing Federals, and if the only ones to be
found here were recruits, so be it. Recruits were anyway the seeds of
seasoned veterans. But the men of this town had proved to be cowards who would not fight and looked to their women to protect
them. Men so despicably weak as that were unworthy of such effort
of destruction as this. The scale of hate being visited on this craven
town felt to him so excessive it was itself a show of weakness. Give
him men of war to kill, not such contemptibles as these. Give him
redlegs who hanged farmers ...militiamen who burned the homes
of widows . . . Federals who murdered girls. . . .

 

Frank James came in from the sidewalk and asked Bill what he
wanted the bunch to do. “Tell them suit themselves,” Bill said. Frank
shrugged and went outside.

They drank without talking, the din from the streets relentless, the
smoky air now carrying into the saloon the distinct odor of burning
flesh. Their fellows came and went, hollering brags of how many
Unionist sons of bitches they’d killed so far this day and how much
loot they’d reaped. Larkin Skaggs came in, listing with drink, and
grabbed up an unattended bottle. He bellowed that the Great Jehovah was this day cleansing the sinful stain of Lawrence from the
earth—then lunged back out into the maelstrom.

Quantrill entered and grinned at the cheers that met him. He
spied Bill’s group and came over to the table to sit with them. He said
he’d been to Jim Lane’s house with a dozen men but found only his
wife and daughter at home. The woman claimed the senator was in
Saint Louis and would not return home for several weeks more.
Quantrill expressed his disappointment and informed her that the
senator would have no home to return to. He had some of the boys
help her remove the preserved foods from the house so she and the
girl would not go hungry, then set the place afire and took pleasure
in watching it burn.

He didn’t believe Lane was in Saint Louis, Quantrill said, but his
men had not turned up a sign of him anywhere in town. The mayor
too had eluded them. But the entire business district was aflame and
much of the rest of the town was now burning and most of the men
on the death lists were even now swinging their picks in hell, so the
day was not without its consolations. “The Yankee nation will long
remember it,” he said.

He paused to light a thin cigar and only now seemed to notice
the table’s subdued mood. He sighed and stared at the open doorway
admitting the cacophony of destruction without. “I know,” he said.
“It does not gladden a man’s spirit to meet with such cowards. The
women of this town are brave and plucky to the last one, but the
men are less than rabbits.”

He turned back to Bill and said, “But then, who thought we’d
even

get
here? Who knew for certain there wouldn’t be a thousand
Yankee soldiers waiting for us this side of the border? They have
their spies too, after all.” He turned up his hands in a gesture of mystification with fortune’s turns. “Yet here we are. And
not
here are a
thousand Yankee soldiers. Should we have turned back for the lack
of them? Should we have refused to kill these vermin because there
were no soldiers to fight for them? Because they will not fight for
themselves?”

“They’re not worth all this,” Bill said, gesturing toward the door.
“Most of the boys don’t share that opinion,” Quantrill said.
“Sufficient unto them that they are killing men of the same Yankee
persuasion that has brought grief to their families. They are exacting
their portion of what Sir Bacon calls ‘a wild justice.’ It’s a madness,
William T., and I must say I wasn’t sure you didn’t have it too. Since
the tragedy at Kansas City, I mean.”

Bill stiffened. “I’ll avenge my sister, Bill—against the fucken Federals. They killed her and I’ll kill them all day long and every day. I

“I know,” Quantrill said.
yearn
to. And I mean their informers too. I’ll hang an informer—
burn his damn house, widow his wife, orphan his pups. But
this
...”
Again a gesture at the door.

“You

know
? Then why . . . ?” He wasn’t sure what he would ask
of him.

 

“Because the madness is also my own,” Quantrill said. His smile
was near to serene. “I’ve not unholstered a pistol today. I’ve not
struck a single matchstick. But I’ll not deny, today or any day to
come, that my hand is on every death and every lick of fire. Some
will call me a coward for this day but they will be lying.”

 

He quit his smile and leaned on the table toward Bill. “Mark me,
William T. The mass of men know that their hearts are a riot of lusts
and base desires, but they fear the risks of acceding to those wants.
They desire to do violence to their enemies but they are too fearful of
provoking violence unto themselves. They fear
consequences,
you
see, and such fear is the rankest sort of cowardice. They cannot bear
this truth and so they cleave to the lie of morality, that sum of shams,
to defend themselves against it, and thus do they lay a second kind of
cowardice atop the first. They warrant no pity.” He pointed at the
door. “I desired to kill them and I was willing to risk any odds set
against me, prepared to suffer any consequence. They can call me a
monster for this day, but not a coward.”

 

He sat back and resumed his tranquil smile and contentedly
puffed his cigar.

 

Bill stared at him. “I don’t know if that’s an admirable argument
or the rankest load of bullshit I ever heard,” he said. “But I guess it’s
worth a shot in the neck.” He pushed the bottle over to him and
Quantrill picked it up, raised it in a toast to Bill, and took a deep
drink. They grinned hard at each other.

 

Then one of Pool’s lookouts came rushing into the saloon to
report the dust of a distant column of riders bearing for the town.
“It’s Federals for sure, Captain,” the scout said.

 

Quantrill stood up. “Gentlemen,” he said, “the ball is over.”

Ten minutes later the guerrillas were ahorse and heading back to
their Missouri hideaways with their wagonloads of loot, some of
them so drunk they swayed in the saddle as they rode away, rebel
yells trailing behind them. Quantrill led them in a southward swing
to get by the advancing Feds.

Not until days later would they come to know that Jim Lane had
escaped them by bare minutes. When he’d been wakened by the
shooting and the warning cries, he’d run downstairs and snatched
the nameplate off his front door, then raced back through the house
and past his gaping wife and child and out the back way, still bootless and in his nightshirt. He ran into the nearest cornfield and raced
between the cornrows and did not stop running until he reached a
deep ravine nearly two miles out of town and there he collapsed,
breathless with fear and exhaustion, his feet bloody. Yet he survived.

Not so lucky was the town’s mayor, who’d hid himself in a
waterwell in the shed beside his house. When the bushwhackers set
both buildings on fire, the smoke was drawn into the well and suffocated him.

A reckoning

Lawrence lies in smoldering ruin. The spires of smoke cast far shadows over the eastern countryside. The business district is entirely
razed and more than a hundred homes are now charred rubble. Of
the houses still standing, few have escaped looting. The hazed air
holds a horrid stench. There are bodies on every street and some are
mistaken for Negroes until recognized as burnt white men. Young
boys are impressed into service to keep the crows away from the
dead. Women wander the streets in search of husbands and sons, and
every anguished cry of discovery adds to the unceasing chorus of
grief. The town will be finding and burying bodies for a week, and
some will go into private graves and some into graves together. No
accurate count of the dead will be made. The records will show that
at least 150 men and boys were interred in the days following the
raid, but the true count is certainly closer to 200. For a fact, not a
woman has been killed. Not a woman has been deliberately harmed
in any way beyond the devastations to her heart and soul. . . .

Yet Larkin Skaggs is still at pillaging. Raging drunk, shooting
anyone he comes upon who does not give him cash or jewelry on his
demand. He reels in the saddle as he trots his horse through the
smoky streets, drawing a growing attention as he goes, for the word
is spreading that the guerrillas have gone, all but this drunk and laggard graybeard.

Despite his besotted state, Skaggs abruptly arrives at the same
awareness and thinks to make away. He heels his horse to a canter
but heads in the wrong direction and comes upon a large crowd of
citizens and all of them bearing arms. He yanks his mount around as
the men open fire. Bent low over the horse, he kicks it hard and goes
galloping back through town, a hue and cry rising behind him.

A fifteen-year-old boy whose two brothers were killed this day
sees him coming and braces his ancient musket against a hitching
post and shoots him in the side as he comes by. Skaggs yelps and
tumbles off the horse. He struggles to his feet as a party of Delaware
Indian army scouts comes riding around the corner. The boy yells,
“That’s one of them!” and points at Skaggs, who staggers toward he
knows not where, completely bewildered by this turn of fortune. He
sees a scout riding toward him and sees the Indian’s carbine come up
and sees its muzzle flash and in that instant his days are done.

Thus did Larkin Milton Skaggs of Kentucky—who in better
times did preach the Gospels and the merciful ways of Jesus—
become the only guerrilla casualty in Lawrence, Kansas, on the 21st
of August in 1863.

The Delaware scalped him. Then the pursuing townsmen came
running up and they shot the dead man a dozen times more and then
clubbed him with their gun butts until his teeth were broken out and
his eyes crushed, until his bearded visage was but hairy pulp. Some
of the men wept in their fury as they battered him. They tied a rope
around his neck and dragged his body through the town, calling to
neighbors as they went, laughing to see women smiting the corpse
with horse apples, to see little boys urinating on Larkin Skaggs
whose indifference to it all was absolute.

They hanged him by his feet from a tree branch and ripped away
the last of his clothes and shot him several times more. Later in the
day some Negroes cut him down and pulled him through the streets
behind their wagon as they sang “Kingdom Coming.” They finally
flung the debased body into a ravine beyond the town limits, and
there the crows descended to it.

Over time, the wracked remains of Larkin Skaggs would rot and
deliquesce to the bones. Portions of the skeleton would be disjointed
and carried away by dogs. A gang of boys would discover the skull,
toothless and variously perforated and fractured, and it rattled with
rifle balls when they took it for use in their club’s rituals. Months
later the clubhouse would burn down and the skull come apart in the
fire. In time even the last of its shards would reduce to powder under
the wear of the world’s turning and mingle with the dust and be
blown out to the trackless regions of open prairie and then to the
deserts beyond.