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Ike Berry read the
passage from Matthew his mother had selected wherein men are
reminded that the Almighty makes His sun rise on both the evil and
the good and sends down His rain on the just and the unjust alike.
    The next day the Widow Berry announced she’d had enough of
Kansas and Missouri too and was going home to Cross County,
Arkansas, where she was born and still had plentiful kin. She would
take both daughters with her. The Berry boys bought a covered
wagon and an ox team and paid for a place for it in a small wellguarded train taking hides and corn and other goods to Saint Louis
for shipment down to New Orleans. Their mother would sell the
wagon in Saint Louis and then steam down to Memphis and ferry
over to Arkansas. On a cold blue November morn, Ike and Butch
stood at the trailside and waved goodbye to their mother and sisters
as the teamsters cracked their whips and the train clattered into
motion and the Berry boys never saw their women kin again.
A sister in love
    As he’d grown to manhood Bill Anderson had naturally become
acquainted with various farm girls of the region and he now and
again enjoyed sportings with many of them. On two occasions, however, each with a different girl, an outraged father had suddenly
come stalking into the barn in a rush of curses and brandishing a
shotgun, and Bill had both times been obliged to take flight with
pants in hand—once leaping from the loading door to a full haywagon below, the other time shinning down a ready rope, both times
his good Edgar Allan saddled and waiting behind the barn. He was
twenty and the girl fifteen on the second of these instances and it had
been a very near thing. He forevermore would carry five blue shotscars on his right buttock as a consequence of it. He enlisted his
brother’s raw doctoring skills to extract the pellets and repaid him
for the service with a detailed account of the adventure.
    Jim was sixteen by then and still untried with a woman, and he
ached to remedy that sorrowful state. It happened that Bill had
recently met a pair of sisters in Agnes City and needed somebody to
occupy the one while he gave his attentions to the other, and so the
first time he got together with the Reedy girls his brother was with
him. Jim had afterward blathered about the experience so happily
and at such length as he and Bill rode for home through the sunrisereddening woods that Bill finally reached out and yanked his
brother’s hat down over his eyes and said that if he was going to keep
talking so damn silly he might as well look it too.
    They had been paying periodic visits to the Reedys for nearly two
years now. The sisters had survived a smallpox plague in childhood
that struck their whole family at once and carried off their father and
enfeebled their mother and robbed her of all interest in the remaining
world. The disease had left the girls with badly scarred faces, but
they were both fullbreasted and slim of waist and so enthusiastic for
sexual play that Bill and Jim hardly noticed their disfigurements. The
girls helped their mother run a small cafe in Agnes City and lived
with her in the upstairs flat. Every now and then Bill would get word
to them that he and Jim would be in town on a given evening, and
after the cafe closed and their mother shut herself in her room for the
night, the girls would slip out and meet them in the alley below. They
would repair to a spot beside a creek in the nearby woods and there
put down blankets and share a bottle and generally have a fine time
until just before dawn when they’d put their clothes back on and kiss
goodbye until their next tryst.
    Each time the brothers returned home from one of these all-night
gambols, everybody at the breakfast table knew what they’d been up
to. Their mother would fix them with accusatory tightlipped stares
while their father grinned and usually made some remark about the
rough day’s work ahead for anybody who might