Wildwood Boys (43 page)

Bush Smith’s tale

 

She raised up on an elbow and stared at him in astonishment.
“You think I’m
lying
?”

 

He thought she might be set to hit him and he waved his hand in
dismissal of her notion. And managed at last to tell her he wasn’t
laughing because he didn’t believe her, but because he did.

 

She made a mock scowl and tugged at his beard in chastisement—then grinned hugely as he put his face to her breasts, still
laughing hard, and then she was laughing too. She pulled his face up
and kissed him, and the clumsiness of kissing while laughing made
them laugh the harder. They laughed until their bellies cramped.

 

“Hey, girl,” Bill said, “let’s get out of here.”

 

“Let’s,” she said. “And I never will come back, I promise you.”

 

“I know it. Let’s go to the hotel.”

 

“No,” she said. “Let’s go to my house.”

They ride out in her buggy, Edgar Allan trailing on a lead rope. The
rain has stopped and the air is clear and cold and the horses’ exhalations plume like smoke. The lower eastern sky is streaked in hues of
fire above the imminent sun. Two miles north of town they turn onto
a narrow lane cutting through the trees and ascending a gradual rise
into the deeper wood. A quarter-mile farther, the trail debouches into
a small clearing and there her place is, a one-room cabin with a
porch and a small dooryard enclosed by a rail fence. There is a stable
as well, next to a swift creek rimed with frost at its banks. The property will not really be hers, she tells him, until she meets the four
remaining mortgage payments. He unsaddles Edgar Allan and frees
Bush’s horse of the traces and tethers both animals on long leads
from the stable so they can drink at the creek. Then goes inside and
sits at the little table near the hearth while she prepares breakfast for
them and tells him who she is.

Two years ago she’d run away from her family’s farm in Bates
County, Missouri, along the north bottom of the Marais des Cygnes,
her mother dead four years by then, her bad-tempered father a worsening drunkard. As her body had begun to assume a woman’s swells
and hollows, her daddy had more and more looked at her in ways a
daddy ought not look at a daughter. She hated to abandon her
brother Ned, two years her junior, but she figured she’d best run off
before her father acted on the notions he’d been getting. She stole his
horse and journeyed north to Doniphan County, Kansas, to live with
a good friend named Lena Jeffers, whose family had moved up there
a few months earlier. The Jeffers were impressed that she’d made the
120-mile journey by herself. They were kind and sympathetic people,
and glad to take her in, knowing the sort of man her father was.

By the end of her first year with the Jeffers she was being courted
by Tommy Colehammer, whose small family was their nearest neighbor. In the spring he asked her to marry him and she said yes. He
gave her a small but exquisite diamond ring that had belonged to his
grandmother, and they set the date for latter July. She didn’t really
love him—she looked Bill in the eyes when she said this—but she
liked him well enough, and he was sweet and truly did love her, and
he would give her what she wanted above all else in this life, a home
to call her own. Tommy’s daddy was going to deed them two hundred acres a little south of Wathena. They planned to build a house
large enough for all the children they would have.

Since moving to Kansas she had regularly written to her brother
Ned, who rarely wrote back. Nearly illegible in their semiliterate
scrawl, his periodic letters were always brief but full of complaint,
mainly about their daddy, who worked him too hard. He said she
was smart to have gone away and he was about ready to run off too.
The only reason he hadn’t done it yet was his fear of the army pressgangs roaming the countryside. He said he’d rather be a bushwhacker than get put into a uniform and made to take orders all day
and get marched out to some battlefield to be blown apart by a cannonball. She ignored his bushwhacker talk as childish fancy and
wrote to him of her engagement and asked him to come live with her
and Tommy, but she had not received a response. Tommy assured
her that as soon as they were married he would arrange for Ned to
join them.

The only guests at the wedding were the Jeffers family, who lived
but a mile from the Colehammer place, and Tommy’s three uncles,
who shared in the ownership and operation of a hotel and adjoining
livery stable in Saint Joseph, Missouri, just across the river, where
Tommy himself had been born. Two of the uncles were married but
childless and were accompanied by their wives. Bush would never
forget the look and feel of that midsummer forenoon in the Colehammer farmyard, the clear sky and soft sunlight, the smell of fresh
grass and the aroma of beefsides turning on spits. Puncheon tables
stood laden with platters and bowls and jugs. Lena’s Uncle Roland
sawed on a fiddle and Tommy’s bachelor Uncle Emmett plunked a
banjo, and the duo sent the strains of ancient Appalachian ditties out
over the Kansas plain. The preacher had just arrived and was taking
a drink with the men when someone harked everyone’s attention to a
low dust cloud beyond the cottonwoods on Hooper’s Creek and
closing toward the farm from the wagon road. Conversations fell
off. The music quit.

A company of riders came into view around the bend in the road,
forty or so, coming at a lope and turning off the road and trampling
through the Colehammer fields of wheat and corn. Their dust rolled
ahead of them to fall over the farmyard as they reined up before the
wedding party. The leader sat his horse in the midst of them, a man
with a close blue beard and eyes that shone as if he were in fever.
Every man of them wore red leggings.

Bush had never seen so many guns nor breathed such a smell as
these men carried, an effluvium beyond rank flesh and tainted
clothes, a malodor that seemed to rise out of something deep within
them and long since gone to rot. An instinct she hadn’t known she
possessed prompted her to slip the diamond off her finger and hide it
in her bodice.

The redleg captain accused both the Kansas and the Missouri
Colehammers of giving information on Union troop movements to
Joe Hart’s guerrillas, who’d long been raising hell across the river in
Andrew County. The Colehammers admitted to being southerners
but swore they’d never given help to Hart or any other guerrillas or
ever would. They produced their parole documents and showed
them to the redleg captain as proof of their Union fealty. But the captain hardly glanced at the papers. The redlegs were studying the
blooded horses in the corral, the good mules and excellent wagons,
the well-kept barn and the large fine house.

“When I saw how they were looking around at everything, I
knew what was going to happen,” Bush says. She sets two plates of
bacon and cornbread on the table, then refills Bill’s cup and pours a
cup for herself and sits down. “I was scared, of course, but I think I
was mostly sad. I knew everything was just about to change, that
nothing was going to be the way I had thought it would be.”

One of the redlegs had been walking his horse slowly around the
wedding party’s wagons, then suddenly reached down into a buggy
and brought up an old Mississippi rifle. “They got guns, Captain!”
he shouted. Bonded southerners were prohibited from bearing arms,
and there was not another gun among the wedding party.

The preacher strode quickly toward the redleg captain, shaking a
finger at him and saying, “You men just hold on. That’s

my
rifle and
not—” But the captain drew his pistol as he shouted, “Hostile
action, boys! Defend yourselves!” And shot the preacher through his
top teeth.

There followed a blurred sequence of rapid action, of blasting
gunfire and the screaming of men and women. Bush would never
have clear memory of what she did in that time, but she vaguely
recalled holding tight to one of the tables and waiting to be killed.
She saw men running, being trampled by horses, saw blood jump
from heads, saw men spin and fall. Little Tector Jeffers, Lena’s
twelve-year-old brother, was standing two feet from Bush when he
was shotgunned off his feet and into an awkward sprawl of carnage
and bloody bits of him spattered her white dress. She saw Tommy
Colehammer running toward her and couldn’t imagine what he had
in mind to do. Had the poor boy been thinking to

protect
her? He
was almost to her when a red spray burst from his chest and he fell
dead at her feet in his handsome wedding suit.

The whole thing did not take two minutes. A mist of gunsmoke
drifted over the yard. There had been eight adult men in the party
and five boys grown beyond childhood and none was left alive. The
only males spared were the Jeffers’ youngest boys—one seven years
old and another not yet four. None of the women had been harmed
but for Lena’s sister, who’d been nicked in the hand by a stray bullet,
and Tommy’s mother, who’d been knocked down by a redleg horse
and her leg stepped on by another. The leg wasn’t broken, but the
pain had her breathing through her teeth. Bush was the only other
female casualty—her lower lip had been split deeply and blood ran
off her chin to add to the red stains on her dress, and how it happened she didn’t know or ever would.

The raiders rounded up the livestock, loaded the wagons with
the sides of beef and other foods, with plunder from the house and
barn. They went from one woman to the next and took from each
whatever jewelry she wore—rings, necklaces, lockets, brooches.
They were laughing like they were having the best time possible,
laughing right through the women’s keenings.

“I cried too,” Bush tells Bill. “Partly for all those good people
killed—for poor Tommy. But the truth is, I was mostly crying for
myself. After a bit I felt so weak and foolish for doing it that I quit.”

While the redlegs were at their looting, another bunch of their
fellows came riding from the south, driving before them a small herd
of horses which the Jeffers women recognized. They saw now the
distant smoke and knew it was rising off their own homestead. An
hour later the Colehammer house and all outbuildings and cribs
were burning too and the fields were afire. The redlegs at last rode
off in whooping jubilation, taking with them all the horses and
stock, all the wagons, and their parting dust mingled with the rising
smoke.

Some of the women had needle and thread in their purses and
Lena’s aunt stitched Bush’s lip while others cleaned and sewed and
bound the arm wound on Lena’s sister. Then they turned to putting
away the dead. By sundown they had buried the men in graves all in
a row, working with no tools but tree limbs and charred pieces of
board and their bare hands. The graves were too shallow to keep off
the coyotes and other scavengers that would come in the night and
the women all knew it and some of them wept with this knowledge—but none said anything of it because the graves were the best
they could fashion and there was nothing else to be done for it.
They’d spoken little as they worked, every woman and girl of them
keeping to her own reeling thoughts as she dug, as she helped drag
man and boy to his grave—fathers and husbands, brothers and sons.
The Jeffers women then took leave and started back to their farm
with the two boys to see if they might find anything worthy of salvage. They departed into the gathering twilight, bereft refugees
scruffing down the road.

“Even though the wedding never did happen,” Bush tells Bill,
“the Colehammers made me feel like I was part of their family just
the same. What was left of the family, I should say. It was only
Tommy’s momma Caroline and his twelve-year-old halfwit sister
Florence and his uncles’ two widows. The widows said we could
live with them in their hotel in Saint Joseph, so that’s where we
headed.”

Bill listens without interruption. Their breakfast plates are still
untouched.

 

They walked five miles to the river and then went north another
two miles to the ferry crossing. The women plucked pennyroyal and
crushed it with their fingers and rubbed its pungent sap on their faces
and arms to keep off the mosquitoes. As they walked through the
night, Bush took inexplicable solace from the low quarter moon and
the countless stars that had endured since God’s shaping of them
who could say how long ago—and strange comfort too from the
river’s utter indifference to the events of that day or any other.

 

They had not a dime among them but the ferryman took pity and
carried them over for free. When they arrived on the street where the
hotel stood, the eastern sky was red as an open wound. A few people
about at that early hour saw them shambling past and could only
gape at their spectral aspects.

 

She was shown to a room and there slept the rest of the day,
sweating and twitching with bad dreams. When she woke to a shaft
of sunlight slanting through the window, her first thought was that
she would not stay with this brood of new widows. After bathing,
she put on the clean dress the aunts had provided, then joined them
all for supper and ate two helpings of everything, despite the red pain
of her bloated lip.

 

That night, when everyone else was asleep, she eased down the
hall to the room where Emmett Colehammer, the bachelor uncle,
had lived, and put on an outfit of his clothes. She turned up the pantleg bottoms to her ankles, belted the pinched waistband with a rolled
bandanna, folded the shirtsleeves to her wrists, stuffed her hair into
a gray slouch hat to achieve a slightly better fit as well as the male
disguise she was after. His boots were large for her, of course, but
Uncle Emmett had not been a big-footed man, and a double pair of
thick stockings took up much of the looseness of their fit—with still
enough room in the toe to hide her ring. She was glad for the absence
of wall mirrors.