Bushwhacked! a (somewhat) true story of the Missouri-Kansas border war.

• Author: Woody, Marshall
• Position: Literary Scene

MY FATHER broke Mr. Elsford in the thrall of a tyrannical summer. The spring had been more suited to Caligula's Rome than May in mid-Missouri. I never had seen such incestuous beauty in a season's foliage. Barring the impulse of some Draculaic fate, I never shall again.

The Elsfords lived in the neo-Tudor next door to us. We had built on an empty lot when only II homes had populated surrounding fields. They had made the move from Leavenworth. Kansas, into quiet Sugar Stream in Springfield. The trouble started on a blustery January afternoon. My sister" and 1 had emerged from the excitable atmosphere of Missouri Tiger basketball into the wintry chafe of wind and high gloom.

The proud, ostentatious Jayhawk sticker in the back of the Jeep should have sent some warning shiver up my spine--but I admit l had no experience with underwater hatred; no inkling of crimes committed against an entity residing outside of the corporal. My only hatreds--pure, true hatreds persisting solely in my youth--concerned evening meal boiled peas, the word 'No,' the incessant buzz of an alarm clock, and the heavy-handed schlock of bed at 10 after a rowdy day. I was content to regard the sticker as something recognized and understood: a sticker, a college. I followed my impetuous sister across the street.

That opening night of our tenuous neighborship with the Elsfords, my father was drunk. Irate, for a reason incomprehensible to me--I only liked basketball inasmuch as I played it on weeknights at the local YMCA. I stood, decked in my Tiger Big 8 Champs gear. My father cursed a storm at the lots across the street: "Filthy goddamned [a word I never was able to find in any dictionary, of slang, filth, or otherwise] Kansans! Stay where you're wanted, you [this word meant nothing, but did ring, when I was to remember it, of unspeakable acts of depravation and sodomy]." Later that night I had the shameful pleasure of repeating it under my breath when I tripped down the stairs. My mother's look spoke volumes; I never would use it again.

The bright orange U-Haul before the neighboring garage stood imposingly as the wind forced its door to clang in metallic grunts. I owned that sense of shame boys somehow internalize, confronted by glaring evidence of my father's mortality. I watched my father totter over to the royal blue Jeep. His particular manner, later in life, would bear itself out against unspeakable foes or others--usually against a crowded conglomerate of ideas rather than particular people. He stood approximately the same distance from the Jeep's back window as I had earlier that afternoon, but had some trouble making out that red, blue, and yellow creature with those two large, white letters tattooed over its plumage. He moved closer to check it out. This brought another exhortation.

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A motion light, unheard of in those days in our area--"Tacky self-important bastards!" my father grumbled--struck on. The creak of a porch door was opened against the night. My father startled and began hurdling steps, toward the porch on which I stood. A dignified getaway. Seeing me, he waved his arms about; I took it as warning to sidestep his gigantic oncoming gaits. He smack me such a blow, as he tripped over me, that it was a few moments before I regained tingling in one of my shoulders.

"Ho-o! Boy, it's cold out here, isn't it?" twirled a pleasant, bodiless voice yardward. "Accident?" it asked without real question. It was Bob Elsford.

"My boy's clumsy," my father said, picking me up along with himself and plopping me down beside him. He pushed me back toward the front door. "Get indoors. Now," came a swift order.

I opened the door. As I did so, I was aware of both the barking beast lurching across the yard and the swift exiting flurry of orange fur. A moment of attrition passed, that I later came to believe could have been integral to the good graces of our families toward each other. The dog yelped and our cat went hissing off across the street for the better protection of higher ground. My father and Mr. Elsford--though we did not know he was Mr. Elsford then--threw up their hands and screamed at their respective animals. Elsford's dog came at his first call. My father zoned into the high winds in search of some dubious moral register, rather than the cat. All to be found was the cat.

My father and Mr. Elsford met, cordially, following a Missouri Tiger win against Iowa State the next weekend. They exchanged a few courteous-but-insincere compliments upon each other's houses, manner of income, chosen college's accumulated honors (though I saw through this to the challenge quite easily), wife, and children--children only upon our side as the Elsfords, as Mr. Elsford so delicately put it, "elected by fate not to conceive." It took me a year and a half to understand this reference to the sexual act. I had thought that to "conceive" meant, as my mother had explained after a thorough reading of Dickens, "to form an idea of."

It was, incidentally, my father's frightful reference to the act of sodomizing a sheep--along with its theatrical demonstration along the Elsford's hedgerow after a Missouri-Kansas conference battle won by Missouri at Allen Fieldhouse, that allowed me insight to the nature of the Elsfords' distant reception.

The problem lay dormant over the nine months proceeding football season. To my sister and I, this meant long trips up to Columbia and gin-breathed single women beating long, boring stories of my mother's sorority antics. The incident sprang up after Kansas defeated Missouri in football. I had been old enough to grasp that a coaching change at Mizzou (Bob Stull replacing Woody Widenhoffer) had borne worse fruit than any before associated with Missouri football. It had been a particularly heart-rending loss by two points, to the team any Missouri Alum would forgo another win for the rest of the season had the Tigers beaten.

During the next three years, certain "incidents" occurred which, counterintuitive to all good sense, drew our families...