The Outlaw Album: Stories

            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.