Woe to Live On

BOOK TWO

Equality of reward is out of the question.



—PIERCE EGAN





7

I WAS BORN ON a cold dark wave, pitched high to be dropped low, somewhere between Hamburg and Baltimore. The tale was often told to me. I squalled belowdecks and bounced on the ocean, a hungry new thing sprung on the world, far at sea.

Missouri was the promised land for Germans. Newspapers in the Old World printed glowing accounts of it and a rush of immigrants headed for the cheap land, thick-wooded rolling hills and good water of the state. My father was a vintner and my mother a vintner’s wife. It was that simple.

My first memory is of steamboats hooting by on the Big Muddy. Picnics were made of their passing, Americans and immigrants alike gathering on river bluffs to watch them churn upriver or down.

As that springtime of war baked into a hot dangerous summer, these thoughts came often to me. The days were filled with strife and hurting and long rides. We galloped up on Federal convoys at Blue Cut and Quick City. In both instances they fought back a little. It was brave of them. None was spared.

By night my thoughts roamed when possible.

Asa Chiles often came to mind. Jack Bull’s father was a tall man, with hair the shade of iron, and a firm chin. His mouth was small and tight, but it could stretch into a smile that was wide enough. My father worked for him in the vineyards, as Asa Chiles’s Winzer, for Asa had a dream of great wines being made in Missouri. The plantation was mainly concerned with hemp growing, but a good chunk of it was set aside for grape experiments.


In late July Josiah Perry went to visit his family in Cass County. We received word that he was killed soon thereafter, murdered by a Unionist named Arthur Baines who lived in that area. It made us all sad, and angry, so we went to the funeral, seventy-five riders strong by now, for new men were driven to us in the bush every day.

A few of the townspeople were glad to see us and the Perry family seemed proud of the high regard we showed for Josiah. We were shot in the neck with much good whiskey, but even that did not make me fond of the town. There was a pinched look to the whole of it, and pinched well and good it had been. That whole half of Missouri was being pinched and put to waste by Jayhawkers, Federals and militia. There were so many of them that we could be but a wrong nail in their boots, painful to walk on but not crippling.

We did what we could for our people.

After a sweet-sung funeral we found Arthur Baines at his home. The nearby presence of Federals gave him too much confidence. We pulled him into the yard as his family wailed.

“Josiah Perry was a traitor and a thief,” Baines cried. He had some sand in him. “You are all traitors and thieves, too!”

A ball took effect in his chest, then, and he insulted us no more.

That was one harmful scene I was glad to be a part of. Josiah Perry, bless his clean white soul, had been a fine comrade, and retribution is necessary to keep any balance.


In the years gone by Jack Bull had had a brother named Stoddard, but he drank a cup of bad milk and died at one. It was a tragedy to the family, and no new brother could be borne by Missus Chiles.

My father had a cabin not two hundred yards from the main house. There was no more than one season in age between Jack Bull and me. Missus Chiles came of the Bulls from Frankfort, Kentucky, and had a delicate spirit. After the burial of Stoddard she brooded for weeks, then began to stroll down the dirt rut to our cabin in the afternoons. My parents spoke almost no English, which was still more English than they wanted to speak, but Missus Chiles made her wishes plain. Me. She wanted to bounce me around, on her knees, on the dirt and high in the air, demonstrating a wide range of robust affection, then soothe me with gurgles and sweets. It was a routine that won me over, and her as well. Soon I was at the main house, with its spread of rooms, wide veranda, and house niggers fluttering about, from dawn to dusk.

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.