The Outlaw Album: Stories

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 Baptist 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.

Camp was pitched and pickets put out while there was yet light to the day. Letters were written to homefolks by those that could, and rents in clothing were mended. Several of the boys, ever playful and game for fun, began to boot a ball of leather about the campsite, whiskey, as always, the victor’s plunder.

I strolled about the camp whittling on a hickory branch that I had fated to be a water ladle. I watched the boys gambol on the grass but had not the spirit for games. I scooped the wood away, leaving a deep dish, intending this depth to aid in the settling of mud before drinking.

I squatted next to Coleman Younger, who had a bottle of whiskey that he had not won but that he intended to drink. He did not look my way when he handed the bottle to me. I dropped the ladle and sheathed my knife, then accepted the bottle. I appreciated his generosity to the measure of a quarter-pint on the first swallow.

“Do not think you are a good man,” Coleman Younger said. “The thought will spoil you.”

“I am a southern man,” I said. “And that is as good as any man that lived ’til he died.”

Coleman Younger was reddish in skin and hair with the temperament that is wed to that hue, and girth and grit enough to back it up.

“You are a southern man—that is proven,” Coleman Younger said. “But a rare one.”

For Coleman Younger to speak of me so set a glow in me that whiskey could not match, nor doubt extinguish. It was for this that I searched, communion and levelness with people who were not mine by birth, but mine by the taking. We drank into the dark, then slept, our bedrolls but a rifle’s length apart.

In the night Captain Quantrill and his party had hallooed our pickets, then rode in and joined us. In the morning there was much cutting up as old comrades were reunited over salt pork and oat cakes. The James brothers from Clay County, Buck and Dingus as they were then known, frolicked with Coleman Younger, Arch Clements, and Black John. Captain Quantrill stood apart, his eyes flat beneath sleepy hoods, and his tongue wiping his lips like a frog sensing flies.

They had taken ten prisoners from the Union Home Guard at Waverly. General Ewing, the leader of the Union occupation scum for the entire district, had issued an order concerning rebels as a mass, and our sort in special, that said if caught we were to be tried and hanged, or shot, whichever took less trouble. This led to some debate among us as to what we should do with the Yankees now in our possession. There were a few among the prisoners known personally to some of us from before the hostilities. There was a sunken-chested, half-sized one among them I knew as Alf Bowden, who hailed from my town. I had once helped him raise a barn on a summer day and danced with his sister ’til her face flushed and we both sweated, but I was not in his debt, nor he in mine. It was a good war for settling debts—some were settled before they were incurred, no doubt—but thin-skinned fairness rarely crabbed youthful aim. Alf said hello to me and I to him, but the courtesy of that situation required no more than that, so there we left it. It would be sad to see him killed, but sadness was on the flourish in those times.

There was no rain on the wind, only the smell of thawed mud and early blossoms, but the boys were lazied by the previous days, so we made a carnival of the camp and sought no demonstrations with our enemy. The ball of leather was trotted out, with nearly the whole of both parties joining in on the sport, stomping the mud into a glue that sucked down boots and held them there. The whiskey was running low and this raised tempers. Riley Crawford, not yet sixteen but the deadest shot among us, missed the ball with a kick of vigor and shinned Big Bob Flannery. Big Bob knotted him one on the head, and Riley cut him under the armpit by reflex. Captain Quantrill then snatched up the ball and hid it away, saying he would shoot any of us who murdered a comrade.

After the noon meal, Captain Quantrill and Black John announced that there would be haircuts for all, because we were to be disguised as Yankees once more for a ride into the Union district around Lexington, and our rebel locks would be noticed. There was much grumbling about this, for our locks were of the southern style and our pride and banner. “I’d rather robe myself with dog skins,” Big Bob Flannery said. “For if we must look like Yankees to win, we will be defeated in victory.” The bulk of us saw the sense in the notion, however, and went along with it, shaving and cutting our hair as if spiffying up for a church dance, but Big Bob had to be held down while Arch Clements harvested his hair patch. Little Arch being that close to his scalp with a Bowie knife sobered Big Bob, for he, like all of us, had witnessed the fashion in which Arch barbered dead, and practically dead, Yankees.

After that Coleman Younger, Little Arch, Pitt Mackeson, and me sat under the husky tree that the prisoners were roped to. Captain Quantrill had made a present to Coleman Younger of a new Enfield rifle that had been captured. We admired the weapon and made chat about its supposed power, the prisoners joining in with a remark here and there.

Pitt Mackeson tried to flare me by mentioning in a bad mouth the incident with the Dutch boy.

“If the boy had freed the rope the hanging would’ve been scotched and required doing over,” I said.

“Judas worked quick, too,” said Pitt Mackeson.

Coleman Younger stroked the Enfield and chambered a round. “You did right,” he said. “Dead from the front is no more dead than from the back. It is a question of opportunity.”

“So is chicken stealing,” Mackeson said.

My arms ached already from the thought of digging his new home, for I was thinking he would soon be in it.

“Jake did right.”

Arch Clements untied the prisoners and told them to stand, then retied them in a file of sorts. “Stay in your line, soldier boys,” he said in his squeaky voice. “For we shall march your meals down.”

Coleman Younger placed his hand on top of my head as he stood. “It was nothing,” he said, “but right.” He ran his hand along the smooth stock of the Enfield, then raised it to his shoulder. He sighted into the belly of the prisoner at the head of the column.

“Leave off with the jokes,” the prisoner said.

The Enfield fired and the first three Yankees tumbled.

Coleman Younger chambered another round. “I would’ve thought more,” he said. “So far this ain’t special.”

The rest of the camp was dropping letters, gun rags, needles, tin cups, and favored corncobs to watch. I thought Captain Quantrill might be peeved by this employment of his prisoners, but he made no move to halt it.

The next shot felled only two, and not cleanly. Their moans sounded like man and wife in a feather bed.

Coleman Younger chambered another round.

“Not exactly a Sharps, is it?” he said.

Little Arch made a straight line of the Yankees again as they had drifted some. Alf Bowden was among the standing, and he called my name, which it must’ve hurt him to do.

“Let us save one,” I said. I pulled Alf Bowden from the line, he being so limp he fell at my touch. “We can send him back to General Ewing, maybe, as a witness that his new law will cut both ways.”

There was blood in the air. It drifted over my bare hands, spotting them like some rare mist. Alf Bowden was yet on his knees, his hands clutching at my legs, pulling himself toward me. The rare mist had freckled one of his cheeks, and his hair had been touched up at the ends by the same breeze, giving him a vaguely pheasant aspect.

The man and wife in the feather bed slept now, and the silence was glass, poised for the shatter.

“We all had friends,” Coleman Younger said. He chambered another round. He was staring at me more thoughtfully than I found comfortable. “That is all off now.”

“There is something to be gained by this sparing,” I said. I did not believe what I had said, but I said it, and hoped only to utter more dream-babble that would justify it.

“I yearn to hear about it,” Coleman Younger said.

I was losing a comrade, this I could see. I had no retort.

A murderer of slyer instincts saved me and made of me a hero. Captain Quantrill had cozied up to us as we were engaged. He held a palm toward Coleman Younger, Little Arch, and Pitt Mackeson, who was fiddling with something near his holster. He then fixed me with a reverent gaze, an approving light coming to his eyes.

Alf Bowden babbled into my toes, his arms encircling my boots, his face between them.

“I quite see it,” Captain Quantrill said. “Yes. We shall send him over to Sigel’s brigade of Dutchmen near Warrensburg.” Captain Quantrill worked his hands together as if to wash them. His feet were moving in little hops, and he would surely have danced had there been a suitable partner handy. “Oh, yes. They far outnumber us. They will want to make quick time and to do that they will come through Creve Coeur Gap. Oh, my, yes.”

His plan could not be missed. Creve Coeur Gap was a narrow slit between two long bluffs that flanked the Blackwater River. General Franz Sigel, alerted by the winner from my mistake, and our most hated enemy, would seek the shortest route to our destruction—through the tall bluffs, thick timber, and slender passage afforded by Creve Coeur Gap.

“Just so,” I said.

Coleman Younger and the others began to nod, then smile at me, their lips raising only on one side of their mouths.

“Jake Roedel,” Coleman Younger said. “You are brilliant with mercy.”

I had not foreseen this plan, but I was giving thanks for its arrival on more than one score. It had saved me my comrades and blessed me with an opportunity named Franz Sigel. He was called a general, and to Yankees and Dutchmen he was so. His very name herded furies into my heart. In my father’s household he had been a saint, or near enough to it to have his picture above the mantel. He drummed up Dutchmen from among those foreigners who had come to America wanting to remain so. He oppressed me, and I longed to sight in on him. I had seen him lure them on, making himself a patriarch for those who would not mix, leading them to Fit Mit Sigel. Oh, the battles my father and I had on Sigel’s account. We raged in his language, my face puffing, and his blue stubborn eyes glowing beneath his thick Prussian brows. He will keep you foreign, I said, and make you snobs about it. Is this wrong? was his reply. We never agreed; I chose to side with Americans and lost entry to the house that raised me.

I led Alf Bowden to a stew pot and fed him.

The brilliance of mercy being a thing that requires judicious use, the other Yankees died. Two shots.

When Alf Bowden could once more keep his feet beneath himself, we set him off on foot toward Sigel’s brigade. It was over twenty miles, and he could not arrive there before dawn.

Around the campfires that night we cleaned our pistols, as we carried from four to eight apiece, the many shots the handguns afforded us over rifles being our chief asset, and the ace that allowed our small group to gamble with much larger ones.

There was considerable youth still in us, as by age that is what we were, and this, we felt, would carry the field. Setbacks had come our way, but cheerful, straight-backed desire to trade shots and victories wiped those from our minds.

There was much to look forward to that night as we oiled barrels and checked powder levels.

As I finished my hickory deep-dish water ladle, I listened to the men. Idle chatter about Coleman Younger’s parole procedures dominated. Many speculated about the impulse for his actions, as he was not regularly cruel. What were his motives when he sighted that Enfield on the Union file, voices wondered, then squeezed the trigger? There were answers. Some seemed to suspect the scientific impulse, but I, I thought the priestly. He was gracing me for the Dutch boy. I could not rest with that in mind.

Before dawn we had reached Creve Coeur Gap and rendered the lush greenery and sweet earth bluffs into a slaughterhouse. We perched on the ridges, then spaced ourselves down the far slopes, making a vee that promised clear shooting for all.

The sun was not yet straight in the sky when our scouts alerted us that troops were approaching. Captain Quantrill was devilish with his logic, for the Yankee-Dutchmen galloped headlong into our surprise. I searched the blue ranks for Alf Bowden but did not see him. My position was such that General Sigel was beyond my range.

The Yankees came on. We waited for the signal from Black John or Captain Quantrill, and I knew that I was among comrades now, for they had put their lives at stake over a plan they believed to be of my design.

I had spared one man and profited with a massacre of Dutchmen.

The signal was given.

I became famous for this.

III. Only for Them

I have died more times than one—perhaps three. This is not rare, but it may serve to stump the windiest of preachers, and a wandering eulogy is suited to those whose journey is uncertain in destination. I have no need for preachers, or faith in their selected destinations, but there must be a place, and I will not be misdirected.

I carved my own passport to that place; it will be as good as any.

Through the night I whittled, lessening, lessening, ever taking away from the oak. Reduction is the design I crave. My blade was a voice with a mind all its own, and it spoke to the wood in slashes, nicks, and great gouges. Flame from the kerosene lamp dodged about with the draft from the window, casting shadows where light had been, and light about my work. The pale wood chips gathered at my feet, a tribute to the diligence of my thick-veined hands and famous fingers.

When the cock had cried, then hushed before the grim, steel light of a rainy day, Jefferson opened my door. He wore high boots of the sort that are meant for polish and not for mud, and a suit of keen correctness, right down to the stiff boiled collar and the four-in-hand knot about his throat. His mustache was pruned so thin that it could be mistaken for a bonus lip.

“There are some things, Jacob,” he said, “that I will not have in this house.”

I felt no obligation to respond. Jefferson waddled across the room a bit, wishing I’d be provocative and force him into courage, but I was mild. He played with his watch chain, looping it through his fingers, waiting. There was some part of him that feared me, that was uncertain that I knew the boundaries of blood. It made us eerie together.

“Do not raise yourself into some sort of hero with my children,” Jefferson said. “Boys tend to admire war and lengthened necks and all. I know better and someday so shall they.”

“I fought,” I said, “for my comrades, and myself, but no more bravely than others.”

“Your bravery,” he said, nearly spitting it, “is a midnight legend.” Jefferson leaned toward me, blowing his chest expansive and crossing his arms, as if I could be frightened. “So bold and brave were you that you managed to kill your father—too bad he failed to see the safety in being your traitorous comrade.”

“I did not kill him.”

“You did not pull the trigger.”

“Exactly.”

“Alf Bowden pulled the trigger,” Jefferson said. “The one man you should have killed, you let go. Did you fail to realize that an American would seek satisfaction from your kin?”

Yes, I thought, gray heads had suffered while young ones went unnoosed. Alf Bowden was yielded to life while nine of his comrades were forfeited, but this did not make a friend of him.

“Shot him in the neck,” Jefferson said. “In front of your mother, he not even having English enough to know why he was killed. Small blessing.” Jefferson kicked about in the wood curls. “What a mess you have made.” I said nothing. “Your scarlet oaf of a comrade, Younger, ruined you for me, Jacob. He should never have visited.”

It was true; I lost something when Coleman Younger happened by. It was the year of the World’s Fair in St. Louis, and he was not long out of prison. I had not seen him since I returned from Old Mex in sixty-eight, but I had read about him often. He came to the door and knocked. When I answered it he said, “Jake Roedel, it is your old comrade, Coleman Younger.” I saw that he told the truth and said so, then welcomed him in. Prison had paled him, and he had become a pinkish man, a color I had never thought him capable of. I remembered him red. I offered him wine, but he was prepared with a flask of his own. We gathered at the table. Jefferson, a young man meeting history, sat at Coleman Younger’s elbow. We drank. The freeness of my own remembrances encouraged my guest to candor, and he spoke truly of our shared activities. Jefferson questioned him, and he answered directly, not noticing that my son was of the generation that cared less for America than they did the land that earlier generations had fled. There was now pride about the awkward consonants of foreign names, and narcissism in noodles called spaetzle, and in porkpie hats called homburgs. In Coleman Younger’s answers were accounts of the days of the Dutch boy, Alf Bowden, Creve Coeur Gap, and numberless others, for the war went on unblunted by my famous deed. Jefferson’s eyes fixed on me when the talk shifted to baseball and the World’s Fair, then he quietly left the house, easing the door closed behind himself. I knew then that he was lost to me.

“I could not turn him away,” I said. “You gained from him—a great bitterness to drive you.”

“My boys will not inherit such from me,” Jefferson said. “They will not find that I killed my own people in the service of traitors, or that I scalped possible cousins for sport.”

They littered Creve Coeur Gap. Their uniforms were valuable plunder, and their sourdough bodies began to rise with the sun. Little Arch Clements started it. They all watched me, and I knew it. They came off with a steady pull, a sound like that of a toothless grandma sucking on a cob of corn accompanying them. I saved mine for some time before flinging it to the river.

“I took no pleasure in that,” I said.

“I take no pleasure in you,” my son said.

He left me to myself.

I went back to work. The voice in my blade called out chop! chop! And my hand obeyed. Slash! Stab! The wood flew until only nubbins survived, and these I ground beneath my boots.

My hand had carved I knew not what, I had not restrained it, and what it wrought was bark chips and wood curls, sawdust and splinters.

Could this be? Could my passport be such?

The chips and curls would not mend. No other design would grow from them. I gathered a handful of the fragrant flakes and raised them to my face. My nostrils rested on the little pile, my tongue touched their salt. Nothing but wood chips—the large rendered small, and confusing.

I blew on them and they began to spray about, then I tossed them to the corners.

Oh, that voice in my blade had divined me well. I would seek no other monument.