Wildwood Boys (2 page)
To let even part of his small acreage go fallow or to quit raising
pigs might have roused speculation about his means of livelihood—
musings that might reach ranchers of adjoining counties who had
lost horses, that might pique the curiosity of agents of the law—and
so Will Anderson, known as Tyler in Marion County, continued to
work his farm even though he could have supported his family on
the proceeds of the horse deals. His partners did the same.
Martha was at first sorely vexed to learn of the new risk he had
introduced to their lives but she soon enough struck a truce with this
circumstance she could not have altered by any rhetoric. She had
anyway always known that life with Will Anderson, long or short,
would be venturesome, had known it since the night of their elopement from Kentucky. She conceded that the man was but following
his nature and no good could come of her resistance to it.
For his part, he no longer resented farm life so utterly, now that
his family’s keep did not depend on it and its tedium was relieved by
the rustlings. Now he knew contentment to sit in his rocker of a
warm evening, smoking his pipe and hearing the strings of Martha’s
zither and watching baby Bill—christened William T.—crawl about
the porch trying to catch fireflies with his hands, the child’s eyes
remarkable for their bright and ceaseless curiosity as well as their
rare coloring, the hazel irises rimmed by a thin band of bright blue.
In years to come Will would on various occasions tell his firstborn son the story of his birth on the coldest day in local memory,
the second of February, 18 and 40, a Sunday. “A regular winter day
just all of damn sudden went about four times colder,” Will Anderson would say. “Birds fell out of the sky froze solid as rock. Wasn’t
much snow but there blew a norther to tear the hide off a goat. Lord,
the wind! The roof sounded like it was in pain. There was frost all on
the inside walls. We had the fireplace booming and still we were
freezing. You were blue as a virgin’s vein and not yet a day old but
you never made a sound, just squinched up your face and seen the
thing through. I knew then you were a hardcase and I told your ma
so. When the wind finally let up, it sounded like war the way the
trees were popping. I stepped outside and the first breath of that cold
air was like getting hit across the nose with a scantling. The wind
had pulled a door off the barn and the cow for some dumb-ass cow
reason wandered out to the trace and just stood there and froze to
death on its feet. I couldn’t so much as put a nick in her hide with my
bowie. Tried to quarter her with an ax but it was like hacking at an
oak stump. Had to build a fire under her to thaw her sufficient to
chop her up bit by bit. Talk about
! Was that way for six days
before it got usual winter again.”
A year after Bill was born came Robert, who in his fifth month
was carried away by some nameless disease. Then came Tommy,
who at age two and with a stick provoked a huge colony of ground
wasps that enclad his head like a snarling yellow hood and stung his
hands and scalp and every exposed portion of him including his eyeballs and the tongue of his open shrieking mouth and he died even as
little Bill and his pregnant mother came running to flail at the yellowjackets and carry the boy away to the house. The head and hands
of the small corpse his father buried under an elm were bloated and
darkly purple.
Martha next delivered Jim and she and Will smiled to see fouryear-old Billy keeping watch over his baby brother and instructing
him in the names of things in the world. When Mary was born the
following year Will Anderson held her as though she were made of
the rarest glass and Martha beamed at his happiness in a daughter.
Then came Josephine, then Jenny the last, and all three sisters would
come to dote on Bill and Jim and feel both pride and rue in the
knowledge that none of them would ever meet a man the equal of
their brothers.
Bill grew up a child of nature, observing intently its ways and creatures, the wind and clouds, the currents and moods of rivers. He
taught himself stealth and moved through the brush like shadow. He
learned to shoot at a young age and was a deadeye naturalborn.
What he did not teach himself about horses he learned from his
father. And all that he came to learn and know he taught to his
brother as well.
He made claim from boyhood to understand the thoughts of
dogs and to be able to talk with them through mind language,
although he sometimes spoke to them aloud, if only because some
things—reprimands, for example, and jokes—were simply of better
effect when heard with the ears and not just the mind. At first his
father had wondered if Bill was touched. But the boy seemed sensible
enough in all other ways and the elder Anderson had anyhow
encountered enough lunacy in his life to know a serious case from a
harmless one. Still, he couldn’t help but shake his head each time he
saw Bill sitting eye to eye with one or another of their hounds and
nodding and smiling as the dog worked its ears and brow and now
and then wuffed low and showed a broad grin.
Martha’s love of books did not slacken over the years, and their
house held an uncommon lot of volumes for that part of the world.
She taught the children early to read and to letter. Their basic texts
were the Old Testament and the first through the fourth of McGuffey’s
but their readings included as well Sarah
Josepha Hale’s
Poems for Our Children,
Washington Irving’s
Sketch
Book,
and the aphoristic wisdoms of
Poor Richard’s Almanack.
As
they got older they graduated to Shakespeare’s sonnets, the
Lyrical
Ballads
of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and the works of a more
recent writer named E. A. Poe, whose macabre and melodious poetry
Bill Anderson thought wondrous. His mother frowned on Poe’s morbid cast of mind and claimed to regret having bought the books at
even the bargain price of five cents each.
In the family library too was Webster’s
the English Language
and Bill loved to pore over it in search of
recondite words with which to affect airy learning. “You are an
olfactory offender,” he would accuse his brother—and laugh while
Jim angrily riffled through the dictionary and his mother smiled
over the cookpot. “Looks like precipitation might be erumpent
today,” he would say as he leaned on his ax and studied the
clouded sky and his father would glower and tell him to talk plain
goddammit or keep his lip buttoned.
They were mad for music, this family Anderson, though Bill
would never learn to play any instrument other than his father’s
Jew’s harp and some few chords on the harmonica, which instrument
his brother played with enviable ease from the time he was five years
old. His father also a harmonicist and a fair hand with the fiddle,
though his wife liked to joke that the best thing about his fiddling
was that it kept the field rats from the house. She herself adept with
the zither passed through generations of her family and which she
taught her daughters to pluck as her mother had taught her in Kentucky. Saturday evenings the Anderson porch would sway with
music born in Appalachian hollows, with melodies sailed over from
Britain’s misty isles. The livelier numbers set them to turns of stepdancing on the porch planks, the plaintive tunes to harmonizing on
ballads of lovers long gone, of honor defended and died for, of foggy
rivers and wandering ghosts and deepwood mountain homes, of
bloodfeuds and murder and the hangman’s rope.
In their first eight years of rustling Will Anderson and his partners
but thrice failed to get horses, each time caught in the act and each
time holding to plan and abandoning the horses and splitting up in
all directions and each man of them making his way back home on
his own. Then came a night when they were driving a dozen ponies
out of Clark County and were suddenly beset by pursuers. Sutpen
the graybeard was shot from his mount and the attitude of his tumble was sufficient testament that he was dead. The escaped three later
learned that he’d been stood in an open upright coffin in front of a
Kahoka general store with a sign on his chest: “Do you know this
man?” But none did identify him and after a few days the stink
demanded interment. His surviving partners lifted a cup in his memory and continued to rustle, just the three.
The following year a posse fell on them as they were driving a pilfered herd up from the riverbreaks of Saint Charles County. The
partner named Harris had his mount shot screaming from under him
and was captured. Will and Nordstrom, the other partner, got clear,
but Will wondered aloud if Harris would hold to their common
pledge never to give up the names of the others. Nordstrom said he
had been friends with Harris most of his life and knew for a fact the
man would hang before betraying a partner.
Three days later in the early dawn one of Nordstrom’s neighbors
who had often bought horses from him and Will came riding up to
the Anderson house at a gallop. Will stepped out on the porch to
receive the man’s breathless report that a party from Saint Charles
County had showed up at Nordstrom’s farm in the night and
dragged him from his bed and hanged him for a horse thief. Hanged
him from a shade oak flanking the house, bootless and in his underwear. The vigilantes were cooking breakfast over open fires when the
Marion County sheriff arrived to find Nordstrom still suspending
crooknecked and frog-eyed in full view of his sobbing widow and
two young children. When the Saint Charles men explained the matter to him, he said he couldn’t much fault them for hanging the man,
then told them to take the body down and lay it out in the house.
“Them boys’re looking for you too, Will,” the neighbor said.
“Asked after Will Tyler by name. The sheriff said he’d bring them
here just as soon as he had him some breakfast.”
Bill Anderson was then eight years old and this his first inkling of
his father’s true and perilous trade. He was deeply impressed by Will
Anderson’s self-possession in the face of this news which he received
as though it were not news at all. The neighbor’s face by contrast
was antic with fear and the boy could sense danger closing fast. He
felt himself grinning with a novel excitement he could not have
described but did evermore want in his life.
At midmorning the hanging party arrived to find the place
deserted but for its livestock, and none of the abandoned beasts did
say whither the man Tyler and his family had fled.
They settled in Randolph County, a mile west of Huntsville and hard
by Black Owl Creek branching off the east fork of the Chariton. The
countryside was thick with river willows and cedar brake, hardwood
forest, glades with rich yellow grass as high as a horse’s belly. Bears
rambled in these woods, wildcats prowled the shadows. The last of
the local wolves raised distant wail in the night’s deep reaches.
Herons stalked the creeks and owls hooted in the dark trees and
swooped in hunt through the hollows. Here had Will Anderson’s two
brothers, Jessup and Hayes, come to settle a few years ago after
they’d finally had enough of their bullying father and struck out
from Kentucky. And here Will found a tract of good bottomland
bordering his brothers’ farm.
His younger brother Hayes was gone away to the war in Mexico
when Will and his family arrived in the heat of mid-summer. Hayes
had taken a Boone County woman to wife in his first year in Missouri but before they’d been wed five months he was widowed by the
cholera. His bereavement was such that when the war broke out in
the spring of ’46 he gave a deaf ear to Jessup’s arguments against
enlistment and went for a soldier. He rode to Texas to join up, rather
than enlist with Bill Doniphan’s Missouri volunteers, for he wanted
no comrades but strangers. He did not write even one letter in his
absence, and now the war was nearly six months concluded and still
no word had come from or about him. Whether he lived or lay dead
in Mexico’s alien ground remained mystery.
Jessup was delighted to have Will for a neighbor and helped him
to construct a family cabin and a barn. The brothers often visited
back and forth, and as they puffed their pipes and passed a jug
between them in front of a fire built high against the icy winter
evenings, they sometimes mused about heading west into the vast
new territories taken from the Mexicans. At first they refused to
believe the tales they heard on every trip to town about the gold
strikes in California, the ready wealth to be reaped there. But still the
stories came, and they began to ask each other if they weren’t fools
not to go claim their own portion of riches. Martha sometimes heard
them as she sat at her sewing or at writing a letter to her sister in
Jackson County. Her lips would draw tight at their foolishness but
she’d hold silent and tell herself it was just talk, that at least he
wasn’t out doing something to set the law after them again.
They had been living on the Black Owl more than a year and the
autumn trees were turned yellow when Hayes came home. His
empty right sleeve was folded and pinned to the shoulder of his
threadbare dragoon’s tunic. His face was sickly hued and skeletal
under a scraggly beard. His hair hung in tangles from under his hat.
He nodded on being introduced to Martha and the children. Bill
Anderson was enthralled by this uncle who had warred in a foreign
land and whose eyes looked aged beyond his years by all the things
they’d seen. Hayes kept a whiskey jug at hand as he sat on the porch
with his brothers and he often sipped of it. Jessup gestured at the
armless shoulder and said he guessed the mash helped some with the
pain. Hayes shrugged and said, “I guess.”
At supper he spoke only in response to direct address and said no
more than necessary. He was indifferent to conversation and
shrugged at most questions put to him. He did not care to say where
he had been for the year and a half since the end of the war or how
he had lost his arm nor anything at all about his time in Mexico. He
was unaffected by his brothers’ jokes and efforts to make him smile.
In days to follow he was content to keep to himself and the comfort
of his jug. Jessup and Will soon tired of trying to animate his spirits
and thereafter let him alone.