Blake - Wildwood Boys

18391862

S AINT LOUIS DAYS

Will Anderson had always felt that life should own more excitement than a farm could ever afford. Hed begun to resent farming from the time he was old enough to be charged with the morning milking, and by the time he was steering a plow he abhorred the yeomans life. His brothers laughed whenever they heard him cursing in his struggles to harness a recalcitrant mule, and they told him hed best get used to it. It was not that he was averse to hard work but that he was possessed of a romantic disposition. As he grew toward early manhood he labored the days long and then lay awake nights and pondered possibilities until he fell asleep with fatigue. He thought the city might be the thing, though he knew little of cities except that they were not farms.

He was not yet eighteen the night he forsook his Kentucky home. He made directly for the neighboring farm of the prosperous Kiner family and sneaked through shadows blinking with fireflies and up to the house past dogs that knew his scent. At Marthas window he hissed her awake and asked her to go with him and be married and live in Saint Louis. She was a shy but comely girl who generally preferred the company of books to social entertainments, but one day shed accompanied her sisters to a county fair and was introduced to Will Anderson, and theyd neither one had eyes for any other since. Her father had repeatedly told her she was pretty enough to make an advantageous marriage and that the Andersons were hardly removed from hardscrabble, but like Will himself she was of a nature more fanciful than practical, and she knew in her heart that no greater excitement would ever come her way than this young man at her window.

They made off in the bright haze of a gibbous April moon, giggling like children, mounted double on the big mule hed stolen from his father, though he did not see it as stealing but as compensation due him for all the young years of labor hed given to the farm. He would not, however, take any of her fathers animals without permission. They carried few clothes and one blanket, a coffeepot, a fry pan, a small bag of books, and the zither she would not abandon and bore slung upon her back.

Damn, girl, he whispered as they made away, I guess I oughtve took Daddys wagon too, just to tote all your goods. This poor mule aint never carried such a load.

She hit him on the back with her fist and said, Its not that much.

They took as well the small dowry her father had been putting aside toward the gainful marriage he envisioned for her, and which money she knew to be cached under a flat stone in the springhouse. Will had yielded to her reasoning that it was their proper due. Youre the husband I choose, shed whispered. Its yours by all justice of the heart. She was a reader of poetry, this Martha Kiner. Hed had to grin as he said, All right, then.

They were wed in Hickman, then ferried over the Mississippi and followed the river road to Saint Louis. They took lodging in a boardinghouse. She wrote to her parents to explain how deeply she loved this young Anderson who set her heart to dancing every time she looked on him. In return came a brief note from her father: You ever come back here Ill whip you to the assbone. He comes back Ill feed him to the hogs.

Though Martha assured him her father would not come looking for her, he thought it prudent for them to change addresses and take another name for a timeJackson, like Old Hickory, whom hed long admired. She nevermore wrote to nor heard from any bloodkin but her elder sister Sally, who also lived in Missouri but far off on its western border. Sally had married a stage driver named Angus Parchman six years earlier and gone with him to work a farm hed inherited in Jackson County. But not even her sister would Martha ever see again.

He thought he should learn a city mans trade and so took a position as apprentice in a hatters shop. But he soon came to detest Saint Louis for its crowded sidewalks and bullying policemen, its ceaseless clamor of wagon traffic and steamboat whistles and bellowing humanity, its multitude of alien stinks. Even the smell of horseshit seemed somehow foul to him when it came off Saint Louis streets. But most of all he hated the citys incipient population of foreigners, in particular its Germans.

There wasnt near as many Dutchmen yet in that town as you got today, he would later tell his sons, but there was already enough so you couldnt help but run into some of them every time you stepped out in the street. Couldnt help but hear them neither. It was Dutchland this and Dutchland that everywhere you turned your ear. What galled me the most was them all the time saying the U S of A is a backward country because some of the states got slavery, saying Missouri ought be ashamed of itself for being one of them. Bunch of damn foreigners squareheads calling us backward and right in our own country! I tell ye, boys, a man can get his fill of such talk pretty damn quick. Goddam Dutchmen. It was in Saint Louis I first heard it said the Dutch are like farts because they most of them loud, they aint about to go back where they came from, and loud or quiet they every one of them stinks to high heaven. Gateway to the West, my sorry ass!Saint Louis is the Gateway from Dutchland is what it is. I seen it happening way back then.

His bitterness toward the citys ways and foreigners was made worse by his day-long confinements in the hattery. He rarely saw the sun. The shop reeked of solutions used in constructing the hats and he began to suffer chronic headaches. His muscles ached for proper use. One day a man who worked at the table next to his and had been employed in the shop for more than a yearan amiable fellow, but increasingly given to tics and soft mutterings as he workedwent crazy in his own home. He refused to get out of bed one morning, and when his wife asked what he thought he was doing and why he wasnt getting ready to go to the shop, he simply and mutely stared at her. Frustrated to anger, she grabbed him by his sleepshirt and tried to pull him bodily from the bed. He in turn grabbed her by the neck with both hands and throttled her. The whole episode witnessed by their spinster daughter who ran shrieking from the house to cry murder in the streets.

Will Anderson read all about it in the newspaper. According to the report, lunacy was not uncommon among hatters and was thought to be inspired by prolonged exposure to the chemicals of the trade. Will had now been at hatmaking for several months and this revelation explained everything to him about his headachesand it put him in a rage. This damned Saint Louis! That damned hat factory!

The following morning he stalked into the managers office and closed the door behind him. He announced he was quitting and demanded the pay he was due. The manager was an Acadian come to Saint Louis to make his fortune, but he bore no love for Missourians and believed Will to be one. He said workers were paid for a full weeks labor only and Will would have to finish out the week if he expected any wages.

Will knew the man kept money in his desk and he stepped around to search for it and extract what was rightfully his. When the manager roughly shoved him back and said, Get out from here, Jacksonyou damned puke! his only thought was to put a quick end to it before the man made outcry. He snatched up a heavy iron desk ornament in the form of a rearing horse and crowned him with it. The managers eyes rolled up as if he would inspect the damage from inside his skull and he fell with the inimitable languor of the dead.