So it’s written down for an accident by the law, and the Ballou kids from that home-sawn house on the Hill come along fatherless into the war years, years that were hard on everybody, those wrinkling years of rubber rations, gas rations, meat rations, and unlimited worry, worry, every day the worry and the wrinkling and another supper leached from the same ham bone and more navy beans. See them waiting for dark before touring the square during the holiday season, heavy wet misting clouds between the tall lamps and their feet, pausing before the keenly garish shop windows, dampening scarves molding to their heads, wearing the uncertain slanting gaze of children who’ve been scalded other times for acting too familiar. A damp virtuosity of misshapen reflections on the street, the windows, the eyeglasses of the few walkers passing by, and two girls noting to each other the presents they most favored from shops they’d never go inside.
My father, drinking the whiskey he loved in the shadowed garage, with meddlers out of sight, fall 1992: “We each of us get dealt a lot of cards by our old ones, son, but you don’t want to play them all.”
The Hill as it was is vanished now, finished off by high heels and humiliated scolds, flattened to nothing and the scraps carted away in 1956. The sound of her high heels clicking on sidewalk cement brought water to the mouths of men within ear of her sashay, moist and listening as she came along so avid and fluid, with fluctuating mounds, the clicks entering their heads with the rhythm of dreams. A blooming of taffeta and a sweet woozy smell. Her voice was rich and round and rolled on and on, seducing with each spin, and the voice gave her a fresh name—Dyna Flo. A smitten car dealer used her in local radio spots, and she said the tagline so it held within it the promise of everything craved: “It’s the Dyna Flo that makes it magic, folks. Come on out to Yount’s Buick’n see for yourselves.” Mr. Yount fell her way, his wallet held open and his mind helplessly made up. He swung by on Saturday nights with bottles of hooch and sporting friends, and the friends soon fell her way, too, and dripped dollar bills to her floor. Dyna Flo Ballou, her first name lost just as her father’s had been, walked tall and flush and brought stray bits of finery to the Hill: curtains of bright yellow, brittle champagne glasses, expensive dresses from St. Louis in the wrong color for my skin, honey, that were soon worn by young girls mopping the floors of town.
My oldest living relative, during a warm winter, while her husband cleaned fish near Mammoth Spring: “She was drop-dead gorgeous. That gal got prettier every time I saw her, and she stopped traffic the first time I saw her. And, lordy, that voice—that Dyna Flo voice! No, no, she wasn’t the kind of beauty you could ever miss—had eyes ’bout as blue as yours, Danny. We used to run into her sometimes when you were tiny. She always wanted to touch you. Touch your nose, tickle your cheek. Just touch you.”
A schedule was arranged between the men with money, and Dyna Flo laughed low and golden from her porch steps until heard by wives who couldn’t stand the sound nor the fact of her. The men were shamed but would not give her up, and marriages split in spots that never healed. Humiliated, the wives gathered uncles, brothers, friends from church with white robes and sticks, and during a rainy spell went to Dyna Flo’s house, kicked the door aside, and threw everything she had into the yard-mud. Get out of town, tonight, or the same train’ll hit you that hit your daddy. A week later every household on the Hill received a letter from the city, telling them to vacate the premises while water lines and sewers were put in and the streets were paved. We’ll let you know when you can come back.
Mr. Tom Finney: “Most likely St. Louis. That’s what I heard. Folks was rough on colored people then, and black was the main one of them colors.”
Mr. Ronnie Thigpen, Egypt Grove, 1994: “I went back by once the sheriff come along for a look. There was a bunch of two-by-fours that was splintered a little bit and had bloody places on ’em. Five or six, I guess. I seen the sheriff sort of kick those two-by-fours away from the tracks, down into the creek there. That’s when he said, ‘Looks to me like ol’ Blue jumped in front of a timber train. Amen.’”
Mrs. E. H. Chambliss, accosted and held by the wrist, outside the Front Street Church of Christ in 1998, a month after her husband’s death: “They was all brought together by love, Danny. The love of that horse. Your granddaddy doted on that thing, him’n Blue, then somethin’ soured and Blue got drunk’n died. That horse was magnificent, hear? Beautiful to see, he was. Would’ve won any race he could’ve been got to—just that special. He was just so special.”
My oldest living relative, sitting in a shaded parlor, upon reading my notes and turning over the last page, folded her old hands and closed her eyes: “There never was a horse. The rest is true.”
Woe to Live On
I. Coleman Younger,
The Last Is Gone—1916
The river takes it from almost anywhere, trims branches with floating logs, smoothes edges on miles of rocky bottom and sandy bank, distorts the shape of the former tree by sucking it down at a hundred eddies of swirling murk, then spewing it back to the polishing touches of the everlasting current. Sometimes the river leaves the driftwood on a sandbar’s lip, or jabbed into a dike—a present for me. I transport such gifts to my workshop. There I take my Barlow and ease it against the wood, scraping gently at the layers, taking substance away to reduce the piece to the design I see in it. I labor on it for days, and I have been laboring thusly for years, but humility commands an admission—many times the river’s hand carved more truly, and I bring no improvement.
On the day that I learned Coleman Younger had passed on to his stoked reward I searched for a special piece, and the river, now an occasional ally, sharing with me both muddy history and uncertain age, obliged.
I enlisted a hangdog grandson to assist me. His name was probably Karl, although he looked a lot like Kurt, especially as regards his subdued aspect. They are both like their father; blond-headed Dutch boys with that sort of Germanness that tape-measures all it meets and argues the logic of all that is not numbers. Not what I’d ever wanted to be, or been, or even tolerated.
The rarity of that clean-shaven oak length being so handy was not lost on me. Luck is a goddess, but if you bet on her she will desert you faster than a Frenchman. But that day I did not hope for luck, so there it was, a four-foot section of river-planed oak. There is never much oak, and this oak was on the first sand spit below the bend in the Missouri River. Karl or Kurt and I never had to wet a boot. We dragged a trail through the packed sand, he being too young to lift it alone and me too close to being young again, I feared. We lugged it along the path through the trees, up the glistening mudbank by the railroad tracks, then across the rails and back to town.
We pulled the wood onto our shoulders when we came to Main Street, me in the lead, my hunched form not much taller than the boy’s. Our boots slipped on the cobblestones, from brick to brick, not slickly enough to trip us, but enough to lend a whoosh to our passing. There were louts on horseback, the shod animals sparking with each step, to avoid. Hemsath the egg man left his wagon in our path with one of his girlish brood sitting on the seat, using a switch to tease the mule about the eyes. A mule will not tolerate such levity long, so we stepped quick and put the pair behind us.
As we passed the Fremont Room of the Saint Charles Hotel, nearly home, a voice called out to me.
“Old Roedel,” he said. “You must be sad that Younger has gone. You may be all that is left now.” I turned to see who spoke. It was Harvey Ball, a man of two-shot killing size, as death would have to scream its presence a while to make it known to the ends of his form. “Let me buy you a drink.”
“I am not a drinking man,” I said. “You know this.”
Ball had that confidence that horsey size gives a man. He reached out to grab my shoulder. “Naw. Come on now, Roedel. You must’ve split a jug with Black John Ambrose of an evening.” I shook his hand off but he took no hints. “William C. Quantrill, the Jameses and Youngers, and Arch Clements and Pitt Mackeson—you tellin’ me they were Ba
ptist men? True Vine Pentecostal and would not drink?”
“I am telling you this—in many a jug there is a trigger, and where there are triggers, fingers multiply.”
“You have plenty of fingers from the history of it,” Ball said. “Did yours work dry?”
Karl or Kurt nudged me in the calf but did not speak. We began to walk on but Ball did not move from our path.
“I whip mules that buck me,” I said. “Beware.”
As we trekked on, Ball said something in a stingy voice that was to the point of, why hadn’t his elders hanged me with the other bushwhackers, or cut me into finger candy like Arch Clements.
It is a good question, and I can put no answer to it.
We dropped the driftwood in the back room of the house. I did my sleeping in that room, as well as my carving. It was as near to being out of my son’s house as I could be without sacrificing the benefits of stove heat.
My son, Jefferson, was in a stir over his evening paper. The donnybrook in Europe was of great importance, he said. The important wars are fought at home, among friends, I said. He said they will be killing Germans wholesale in this one, and didn’t that please me? I am an American of sorts, I said. Germans are not my breed. You miss the point wide, he said.
My room safeguarded me from his ignorance. Behind the closed door I began to carve, I knew not what. Wood flakes curled about my feet and gathered on my clothes and hair. My knife turned in patterns I could not foresee, and something I did not expect would come of it. The worst and best in this life are that way.
Tea trays, I have made, and tankards with handles like an antelope’s head, and hat racks and lazy Susans. But this night it was war and Coleman Younger and this land where Germans can change their names but not their ways that governed my blade by ghostly touch. It had been war enough for any man, less those blood-demons who choose man’s form as disguise, and it was this I would show, if my hand be true, my blade honest in its cuts.
When hunger hailed me I dropped the knife and entered my son’s house. Jefferson, Herta, and the boys were gathered in the main room, huddled beneath a tall glowing globe of light. Herta was reading aloud from Alcott, and the boys’ rapt attention to such childishness insulted me. I remembered a time when their age would have had consequences, for they were mostly over twelve. I stood alone while they all sat. Soon Herta ceased reading. She began to look to Jefferson, he to her, the boys to me.
“You boys,” I said, “have reached what we called the killing age.”
Jefferson turned shocked, as if two and two had retreated into three, then mad. He stood and addressed me. “Your melancholy past is not meant for the ears of the young.”
“No,” I said. My feet carried me from the room, my son glaring at me. “You are wrong.” He does not love me for he is German-proud, and believes that had time and history allowed for it, it could have been him as easily as another. He knows—and he is right. “No, it can be meant only for them. Only for them.”
II. I Have Been Found in
History Books
We rode across the hillocks and vales of Missouri, hiding in uniforms of Yankee blue. Our scouts were out left flank and right flank, while Pitt Mackeson and me formed the point. The night had been long and arduous, the horses were lathered to the withers, and dust was caking mud to our jackets. There had been whiskey through the night, and our breaths blasphemed the scent of early-morning spring. Blossoms began a cautious bloom on dogwood trees, and grass broke beneath hooves to impart rich, green odor. The Sni-A-Bar flowed to the west, a slight creek more than a river, but a comfort to tongues dried gamy and horses hard rode. We were making our way down the slope toward it, through a copse of hickory trees full of housewife squirrels gossiping at our passing, when we saw a wagon halted near the stream.
There was a man holding a hat for his hitched team to drink from, a woman, a girl in red flannel, and a boy who was splashing about at the water’s edge, raising mud. The man’s voice boomed to scold the boy for this as he had yet to drink.
“Dutchman,” Mackeson said, then spit. “Goddamn lop-eared Saint Louis Dutchman.” Mackeson was American and had no use for foreigners, and little for me. He had eyes that were not set level in a bent face, so that he saw you top and bottom in one glance. I watched him close in gunplay, and kept him to my front.
“Let us bring Black John up,” I said.
I turned in my saddle and raised my right hand above me, waved a circle with it, then pointed ahead. Black John brought the boys up, he taking one column of blue to the right, Coleman Younger taking the other to the left.
The Dutchman heard the rumble of hooves but had no chance to escape us. We tightened our circle about the wagon, made certain the Dutchman was alone, then dismounted.
The family crusted around the Dutchman, not in fear, but to introduce themselves. Our uniforms were a relief to them, for they did not look closely at our mismatched trousers and our hats that had rebel locks trailing below them.
Most of the boys led their mounts to the stream, opened whiskey bottles, and generally tomfooled about near the water. Black John Ambrose, Mackeson, me, and a few others confronted the Dutchman. He offered his hand to Black John, whose stiff height, bristly black curls, and hard-set face made his leadership plain. Black John spit, as Americans are wont to do when confident of their might.
“Wilhelm Schnellenberger,” the Dutchman said, his hand finally dropping back to his side.
I spit, then pawed the gob with my boot.
“Dutchman,” Mackeson said. “Lop-eared Dutchman.”
“Are you secesh?” Black John asked, his voice ever so coaxing. “Are you southern man?”
“No, no, no,” the apple-headed Dutchman answered. His eyes wandered among us. He smiled. “No secesh. Union man.”
The woman, the girl, and the boy nodded in agreement, the boy beginning to study our uniforms. Some of the fellows were kicking a stick to and fro, trying to keep it in the air, whiskey to the winner. It was a poetry moment: water, whiskey, no danger, a friendly sun in the sky, larks and laughter.
“Stretch his neck,” Black John said. “And let’s be sharp about it.”
The woman had some American, and the Dutchman had enough anyway, for when she flung her arms about him wailing, he sunk to his knees. He was mumbling to his god, and I was thinking how his god must’ve missed the boat from Hamburg, for he was not near handy enough to be of use in this land.
“What’s he babblin’?” Mackeson goaded me.
“He is praying to Abe Lincoln,” I said.
Coleman Younger had a rope, but he would not lend it as it was new, so we used mine. Mackeson formed it into a noose with seven coils rather than thirteen for he had no inclination to bring bad luck onto himself. Thirteen is proper, though, and some things ought to be done right. I raised this issue.
“You do it then, Dutchy,” he said, tossing the seven-coiled rope to me. “Bad luck’ll not change your course, anyhow.”
As I worked to make the Dutchman’s end a proper one, he began to talk to me. The situation had sunk in on the family and they had become dull. The Dutchman wiggle-waggled in that alien tongue. I acted put-upon by having thus to illustrate my skill in oddball dialects, lest I be watched for signs of pride in my parents’ tongue.
“We care nothing for the war,” the Dutchman said. I fitted the noose with thirteen coils around his neck. “We are for Utah Territory. Utah. This is not a war in Utah, we learn.”
“This war is everywhere,” I said.
“I am no negro stealer. I am barrel maker.”
“You are Union.”
“I am for Utah Territory.”
Mackeson threw the rope over a cottonwood branch and tied it to the trunk. Some of the other boys hustled the Dutchman onto the seat of the wagon, startling the team and setting off screeches of metal on wood, mules, and women.
I stepped back from the wagon’s path, then turned to Black John.
“He says he is not a Union man
,” I said. “He was codded by our costumes.”
“Sure he says that,” Mackeson said. “Dutchman don’t mean fool.”
“He does, does he?” Black John said. He was remounted and others were following suit. “Well, he should’ve hung by his convictions rather than live by the lie.” Black John nodded to Mackeson. “He’s a goddamn Dutchman anyhow, and I don’t much care.”
Mackeson slapped the mules on the rump and the Dutchman swung.
“One less Dutchman,” Coleman Younger said.
They all watched me, as they always did, when wrong-hearted Dutchmen were converted by us. I mounted my bay slowly, elaborately cool about the affair.
The woman was grieved beyond utterance, the little girl whimpered behind her. The boy walked beneath his father’s dancing boots, then made a move to loosen the rope about the cottonwood trunk. He was close to fourteen and still foreign to his toes.
I gave no warning but the cocking of my Navy Colt and booked the boy passage with his father. My face was profound, I hope, when I turned to Black John.
“Pups make hounds,” I said. “And there are hounds enough.”
Black John nodded, then solemnly said, “Jake Roedel, you are a rare Dutchman.”
Mackeson looked at me as if I were something hogs had vomited.
“Did you see that?” he asked. “Shot the boy in the back! Couldn’t shoot him face-to-face. Goddamn Dutchman! Why’d you shoot him from the back?”
“I am tender toward boys,” I said. “But I would put a ball in your face, Mackeson, should affairs so dictate.”
Black John then repeated himself on the sort of Dutchman I was, and we moved on to the silence of the family’s pain. I positioned myself so that Pitt Mackeson’s shoulder blades were ever visible to me.
Near dark, we shed our blue sheep’s clothing. We were to rendezvous with Captain Quantrill west of Lone Jack, just above Blue Cut.