Woe to Live On: A Novel (9 page)

As is the general rule with babes, Jack Bull and me found no fault with each other, but discovered a vast world full of slobbering adventures that we took best together.

My parents were treated well, and, at night, when I was once more in their orbit, stared on me in a stupefied way. I spoke English like a jackdaw by age six, and this skill annoyed them. I had had a baby brother named Luther and a sister called Heidi, but neither of them lived a week and I recalled them only as graves. My father, Otto, was kind and my mother kinder.

But Asa Chiles was fascinating. As far as you could see, he owned. No one dared pass him in the street without a greeting. His wing shot was hell on edible birds, and he rode horses in a manner that would put a Comanche’s nose out of joint. There was no one day that made him my idol, but a long succession of days in which he was hero to them all.

My father grew vines, and grumbled about this and that, most often in the company of other cranky Dutchmen who wore moustaches down to their necks and found very little to their liking. They had come to Missouri for a fresh start, but wasted their free time by attempting to model this new land on the old land they had been so eager to flee. The great sense in this never struck me.

I was as American as anybody.

Our mode of warfare was an irregular one. We were as likely to be guided by an aged farmer’s breathless recounting of a definite rumor, or by the moods of our horses, as we were by logic. It was a situation where logic made no sense. So we slouched about in wooded areas, our eyes on main roads and cow paths, watching for our foe to pass in reasonable numbers.

They often did.

The windy flab-grunts of the dying were a regular sound in our days. When the fray was joined, and blood raced to my extremities, things occurred to me and I did them. At Rush Bottom I blasted down two wagoneers who made a feeble attempt on my life with a shotgun. I noted that their faces flooded with expressions of sweet fantasy just as I worked my trigger. Some pleasant falsehood had been their last thought.

As we slithered over hills and down valleys and through great forests, we acted out sudden tragedies for many a luckless oppressor. No amount of troops could protect them all, and we drove that point home.

We were whimsical about destruction. Bridges, barns, homes—now you have it, now no one does. Flames all a-crackle and us in swift retreat was a common scene.

I had not the education to understand all of this. I could read, yes, and write. Some ciphers were known to me and Asa Chiles’s library had sailed me to places I would never see. Asa was a huge admirer of Homer, and George Borrow, William Cobbett, Pierce Egan the Elder, Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott. The Bible had been mauled by my hands also. But this was nowhere near enough.

Late in August we were on the Blackwater, riding past a sloppy fence that surrounded the ashes of a home and a standing chimney. On the fence posts were the heads of two of our occasional comrades. They were ripe and pecked. Black John said we must bury them. We searched and searched but could not find them below the neck.

A year earlier this would have sickened me beyond
consolation for days. But we were hardened youths by that point. Warfare was what we knew. Though we were mostly still boys by civil calculations, we had by now roughed up the swami and slept where the elephant shits. Shocking us would have required some genius.

I remembered this: Missus Chiles pulling me by the ears, then cupping my chin in her hands and saying, “I like having you in the house, Jacob, my boy. I just enjoy the noise of it so much.”

Such recollections were nourishing to me. I was a good child and hoped I had become the man you would have predicted from my tyke version. It is hard to know.

Guns had always figured in my life. When Jack Bull was given an overweight, aimless shotgun at age eight, one was soon found for me. We kicked through brier patches and shocked rabbits with our thunder, but it took time before we could hit any. That didn’t matter. Even as we missed our targets, we imagined ourselves to be kids who would grow into dangerous men, perhaps the sort who had whipped Mexico or England.

Asa took us in hand and taught us things. We learned to bow to ladies and touch two fingers to our hat brims on passing men. “Manners won’t cost you a thing,” Asa said. “But they may gain you plenty.”

When the first chill winds blew in our faces, we became furious in our need to put on some hurts before full winter arrived. The tempo of our deeds increased to a crescendo.

At Latour we were fired on, Cave Wyatt being wounded. Three citizens paid for it and Arch did some bad-dream alterations on heads and bodies, striving for more comical fits. We burned houses and stole clothes, silver and garish trash, sometimes overloading our mounts, so acquisitive had we become.

When the leaves were giving it up and falling, Gus Vaughn returned from a trip. He sat with Jack Bull and me, his big red face looking somber.

“I have news of home,” he said. “Hank Pattison is murdered. Our old neighbor, Jantzen, got him with his gang of militia.”

“That is sad,” Jack Bull said. “He was a good southern man and friend. What of Thomas Pattison?”

“Oh,” Gus said, “he is murdered, too. Jantzen was on a bloody spree thereabouts.”

“That Jantzen was a bad man before he was a man,” Jack Bull said fiercely. “Where has he gone with his militia?”

“He goes nowhere now. The son of a bitch got what was coming to him. Thrailkill’s boys looked him up and he got what was by God coming to him.”

“I wish it had been us,” I said.

“Sally Burgess married a Federal from Michigan,” Gus said. “Her whole family hides their faces.”

“Any other news?” I asked.

“Well, yes, Dutchy. Alf Bowden killed your father.” Gus pulled his hat off and held it in his hands. “Bowden shot him in the neck down by the river, then booted him along Main Street ’til he died.”

Jack Bull’s hand went to my shoulder and my heart pumped bad blood-thoughts to my head.

“My father,” I said. “My father was an Unconditional Unionist. Like all the Germans. An Unconditional Unionist.”

“Well, yeah,” Gus said. “But he was mainly known as your father, Dutchy. You got a reputation.”

“I spared Bowden,” I said. My mind was in a whirl, and a mix of unpleasant ideas came to me. “You know it. I know you know it. I spared Bowden.”

“It didn’t make a friend of him,” Jack Bull said. “You taught him mercy but he forgot the lesson.”

“Both your mothers went to Kentucky,” Gus went on. “By train, I think.”

I felt my face warp and wobble and my arms quaked. I could have cried. Gray heads suffered while young ones went unnoosed.

“I might as well have shot him myself,” I said. “Mercy has treachery in it. I need to forget I know of it. I’ll put it aside. I am not too brilliant with it.”

“That may be the answer,” Jack Bull said.

Oh, everything happens.

W
HEN ALL THE
trees were bare, we had trouble. We suffered fearful subtractions. John Colbert was killed. Lafe Pruitt, Ralph Sawyer, Randolph Haines and Joe Loubet were cut off in a range of trees and hunted down, then blasted neutral by a large squad of Federals. Wounds were as likely as sunup. It was a miserable season to fight in.

Where it was possible we balanced things. At Holden we found a handful of militia, and Riley, Jack Bull and me did all the balancing. Five graves would be filled whenever someone took the trouble to dig them. We looted the Holden store and found forty pair of boots. The boots smelled finely of fresh leather, and in a corner of the store there was also a whiskey barrel. We punched holes in the boot tops, strung them together with rope, then bashed in the barrel and filled them with Old Crow. We hung the whiskey-sloshing boots about our necks like nooses, and drank by kicking up the heels.

Just into December Black John and George Clyde decided we must disband until spring. Our large group was too easily located by larger groups of the enemy when we were so
slowed by the season. Our plan was to go off and hide in groups of four, surviving the winter as best we could.

Our breaths gave off clouds that wafted in the air and we stamped the ground to warm our feet. There were nervous looks in many faces. Small groups might be more easily hidden but if found it would be awful hot.

As the cold wind slapped red on our cheeks and our nervous eyes went here and there, Black John Ambrose put on a ’til-we-meet-again-in-the-spring speech. When Black John’s ideas were spelled out plain, it was sometimes less good than confusion had been. He shouted about the cloven foot of tyranny and the Founders of our Nation and bodiless comrades and blue-bellied murderers who were even now sniffing close to our women and how wonderful the feel of an oppressor’s blood is when it dries on your hands. It went on and on.

When his speech was played out the boys raised a couple of huzzahs and hoorahs. He accepted the acclaim with the coolness of an uncaught caesar.

Then we all parted, heading for secret caves, or far-in-the-woods relatives, or friendly southern strangers, to wait out the bad weather.

Jack Bull, me, George Clyde, Riley, Turner, the Hudspeths and Holt went the first leg of our journey together. At Captain Perdee’s farm we split up. Jack Bull and me and Clyde and Holt went on to the neighborhood of a certain miss named Juanita Willard. Clyde was sweet on her, but we could not stay safely on the Willard farm. This fact brought us to the nearby place of Jackson Evans.

Jackson Evans had been a friend to Asa Chiles. At one
time the Evans place had been highly prosperous and he’d owned more niggers than anyone in those parts.

Things had changed.

The Evans household held Jackson, his wife, a small girl called Honeybee but whose right name was Mary, and a teenaged girl who was the widow of Jackson’s son, Jackson, Junior. Junior had been killed at Independence in the house-to-house fighting after only a few weeks of marriage. The widow girl was named Sue Lee and her maiden name had been Shelley.

All the niggers were gone to Kansas or into the Federal Army. The farm had a very lonely feel to it, for it was plain that it had been designed for dozens to live there. And they had once—but no more.

A layer of hills were closed in around the farm like some feminine embrace. George Clyde and Jack Bull selected a likely spot among the humps and we started to dig in. To stay in the house would be ridiculous. Patrols passed by plenty.

Jackson Evans loaned us shovels and a pickax and we went to it, slamming away through the thin frozen topsoil. Holt and I switched off on the pickax while George and Jack Bull did the shoveling.

The day was gray, though not moist. It was cool, but a good clean sweat came up from the work.

“It has been a while since we’ve done work,” Jack Bull said. “There is something soothing about it.”

George Clyde laughed, his wide, square face splitting. He was not hard to like but terrible to cross.

“Work has never been my main ambition,” he said. He
laughed more and patted Holt on the shoulder. “We have done much work—just look at these hands—but I think I’ve spied an easier way to riches.”

“Spell out this miracle,” Jack Bull said.

“Why,” Clyde said, “you just ride up with the boys and
take
it.”

“Ah, it’s the good old rule, the simple plan,” Jack Bull sang. “Those who would should take, and those should keep who can.”

“Exactly,” said Clyde. “It’s a workable method—that is proven.”

George Clyde and Jack Bull Chiles shared the nature that adapts quickly to the practical, but it was still inconvenient to my mind. It was the difference between What? and Why? Though I might rob, I did not believe myself as a robber.

“I don’t know that the time is yet right for robbing wholesale,” I said.

Clyde scooped a shovelful of dirt, then flung it aside. He grinned at me.

“You don’t know enough, then,” he said. “I think it is as right as two rabbits.”

I looked at his face and decided that I would differ with him on this but not make a debate of it.

Something of the master builder rose to the surface in Jack Bull. The dugout was going to be deep and wide enough to hold us, our horses and their forage, and a rock and mud chimney. This meant much sweaty labor before any comfort could be had.

I gathered rocks for the chimney when not digging. The
hillsides were rocky and angled steeply, impossible terrain for plowing. Under the bare trees I scrambled about, hefting stones and inspecting them for weight and flatness. My compact dimensions allowed me to easily crawl under cockspur bushes and sticker weeds if a good chimney piece was beneath them. A few scratches showed up on my face but it was fun. The truth of it is, it was fun to be building something.

All of us dug hard and blistered and heehawed at joking comments. By the end of the second day we had worked off a bunch of our jumpy attitudes and were feeling calmed by the effort.

Jack Bull, with his fingers at his chin, paused often to stare at our ever-growing hole, then would begin to pace off lines and shapes, but he did it often and different each time. This was unsettling. He had grand plans for this ground but maybe too many of them.